THE MARÉCHALE

PREFACE

This book is the unexpected result of a brief visit which the Maréchale paid her daughter and the writer in the spring of this year. She was daily persuaded, not so much to talk of the past, as to live parts of her life over again, for in her case the telling of a story is the enacting of a drama. At a meal-time she rarely keeps her seat, though she is apparently unconscious of leaving it and surprised that she requires to return to it. She begins to describe an incident, to recall a conversation, to sketch a character, and straightway she is suiting the word to the action, the action to the word, holding the mirror up to nature, using her brilliant dramatic gift, which is as natural to her as singing is to birds, to call up faces, to bring back voices, to restore scenes, which are all, whether grave or gay, summoned out of a dead past that has suddenly, as by the wave of a magician's wand, become once more alive.

One day I said to her, "Have you never thought of giving all this to the world?" She answered, "I am often asked to do so, and some day I may." Soon after she surprised me by saying, "I have come to the conclusion that something ought to be written now, and you must write it."

A mass of materials in English, French and German—reports, letters, diaries, magazines, and other documents—has therefore been put at my disposal. I have not used a tithe of what I have received, and much of what is left is as good as what has been taken. More will ere long, I doubt not, see the light. One of my best sources of information has been the Maréchale's own phenomenal memory, which I have tested times without number, and found invariably accurate, except in dates. Events are apt to be associated in her mind not so much with years as with homes and children, which are much more interesting.

With regard to the subject of the fourteenth chapter, the Maréchale would have preferred not to break the silence which she has maintained for a number of years, but after reading her letters and diaries I have urged her to let a brief statement be published, first because I feel that she owes something to her old comrades in the fight, and second for the sake of her own and her family's future work. Members of the family who have been consulted, as well as other friends, desire this even more strongly than the writer does.

This book consists of a few sections from a life which, like Mrs. Browning's pomegranate, "shows within a heart blood-tinctured." To a heart of love add a spirit of fire, and you have the Maréchale. Blood and fire—that is what she was at the beginning, and that is what she will be to the end. One has often heard her say that she has never been more in her element than when, on entering some town, she has found herself confronted, in a theater or casino, by "all the devils of the place." She is happy whenever "Jesus is going to have a chance for a night." In the natural course of things her greatest battles are still before her. England has need of her, France perhaps still greater need. May it be long before the Maréchale reaches her last campaign! Meanwhile the old battle-cry, En Avant!

The subject of this sketch—written during a brief respite from other work—is at present far away, but I know that what she desires to give to the world is a sense of the Divine, the miracle-working power which rewards a child-like faith, and that she will be glad if every reader closes the book with a Gloire à Dieu!

J. S.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

Finely Touched to Fine Issues

CHAPTER II

A Girl Evangelist

CHAPTER III

The Secret of Evangelism

CHAPTER IV

Christ in Paris

CHAPTER V

Freedom to Worship God

CHAPTER VI

The Soul of France

CHAPTER VII

Woman's Vocation

CHAPTER VIII

The Renunciation of Home

CHAPTER IX

The Friendship of Christ

CHAPTER X

The Burning Question

CHAPTER XI

The Prodigal Son

CHAPTER XII

So Great Faith

CHAPTER XIII

Beauty for Ashes

CHAPTER XIV

To Thine Own Self Be True

CHAPTER XV

Sursum Corda!

LIST OF PORTRAITS

The Maréchale . . . Frontispiece

Catherine Booth . . . 32

(From a drawing by Edward Clifford, exhibited in the Royal Academy and presented to Mrs. Booth)

The Maréchale in the Café . . . 114

(From the painting of Baron Cederström)

The Maréchale . . . 160

(From a photo taken in Paris, circa 1890)

The Maréchale . . . 302

(From a photo taken in London in 1913)

CHAPTER I

FINELY TOUCHED TO FINE ISSUES

In the summer of 1865 William Booth, Evangelist, found his life-work. For some time back his imagination had been more than usually active. He could not help thinking that all his past efforts had been but tentative solutions of a difficult problem. He felt the spur of a vague discontent. He seemed to be groping his way towards an unrealised ideal. At length he got the inner light he needed. While he was conducting a series of meetings in a tent pitched on the disused Quaker burying-ground at Baker's Row, Whitechapel, he saw his heavenly vision and heard his divine call. He accepted a mission which was no less real than those of Hebrew Prophets and Christian Apostles. The words in which he describes his vocation form part of the history of Christianity in England. "I found my heart," he says, "strongly and strangely drawn out on behalf of the million people living within a mile of the tent, ninety out of every hundred of whom, they told me, never heard the sound of the preacher's voice from year to year. 'Here is a sphere!' was being whispered continually in my inward ear by an inward voice ... and I was continually haunted with a desire to offer myself to Jesus Christ as an apostle for the heathen of East London. The idea or heavenly vision or whatever you may call it overcame me; I yielded to it; and what has happened since is, I think, not only my justification, but an evidence that my offer was accepted."

Thus it was that on a memorable June night, having ended his meeting and after-meeting, he rushed home, tired as usual, but with a strange light in his face which indicated an unusual glow in his heart.

"Darling," he exclaimed to his wife, "I have found my destiny!"

His unexpected words, like the touch of Ithuriel's spear, proved the quality of his life-mate's womanhood. For a moment she trembled under the test. While her husband poured out his burning words about the heathenism of London, and expressed his conviction that it was his duty to stop and preach to these East End multitudes, she sat gazing into the empty fireplace. The voice of the tempter—so she imagined—whispered to her, "This means another new departure, another start in life." She thought of five little heads asleep on their pillows upstairs, and remembered that she had already passed through more than one time of domestic anxiety. But no woman living at that time was more ready for acts of daring faith; few, if any, were so animated by scorn of miserable aims that end in self. After silently thinking and praying for some minutes, she said:

"Well, if you feel you ought to stay, stay. We have trusted the Lord once for our support and we can trust Him again."

Thus the die was cast, and the day ended with one of those scenes by which our common humanity is ennobled. "Together," he says, "we humbled ourselves before God, and dedicated our lives to the task that it seemed we had been praying for for twenty-five years. Her heart came over to my heart. We resolved that this poor, submerged, giddy, careless people should henceforth become our people and our God their God as far as we could induce them to accept Him, and for this end we would face poverty, persecution, or whatever Providence might permit in our consecration to what we believed to be the way God had mapped out for us."

One feels perfectly certain that these two modern apostles would have fulfilled their destiny even if they had stood alone; but it could scarcely have been so ample and glorious a destiny if God had not given them children who inherited their gifts and helped them to realise their ideals. It is the simple truth that the ruling passion of each of their eight sons and daughters has been the love of souls; each of them has exulted to spend and be spent in the service of Christ, which is the service of humanity; and if one of them has been too feeble in her health to be a militant Salvationist, the great Captain of our salvation accepts the will for the deed.

Among all the bold and original acts by which the breath and the flame of a new life have been brought into the modern Church, none is more striking, and yet none more simple and natural, than the revival, after all these centuries, of the apostolic ministry of women. Like Philip the Evangelist of Cæsarea, William and Catherine Booth "had four daughters who did prophesy"; brave and gifted English girls who, baptised with the Holy Spirit, used their dower of burning eloquence to bring sinners to the mercy-seat. If to-day "the women that publish the tidings are a great host," the fact illustrates the power of example. In every new movement there must be daring pioneers and self-sacrificing leaders. For woman's "liberty of prophesying," as for every other form of freedom, the price has had to be paid. The purpose of this little book is to sketch the life of the eldest of General Booth's four daughter-evangelists, who was called to carry the spirit of the Gospel—Christ's own spirit of love—first into many of the cities of England, and afterwards, in fulfilment of her distinctive life-work, into France and Switzerland, Holland and Belgium. If her story could be told as it deserves to be, it would stand out as one of the most remarkable modern records of Christian work, for there is perhaps no one living to-day who has seen so much of what Henry Drummond used to call "the contemporary activities of the Holy Ghost."

Catherine Booth the elder, the Mother of the Army, was already in her thirty-second year when she wrote her famous brochure upon Female Ministry, and, not without fear and trembling, delivered her first evangelistic address in the Bethesda Chapel at Gateshead-on-Tyne, where her husband was minister. Little Catherine, who had been baptised in that chapel, was in her second year when her mother began public speaking, and in her seventh when her father found his destiny. Probably no child ever had greater privileges than she enjoyed. Her earthly home was a house of God and a gate of heaven; and from the first she seemed to respond to all that was highest and best in her environment. She was one of those happy souls who have no memory of their conversion, who cannot recall a time when they did not heartily love the Lord Jesus Christ.

Her father was the centre of all her childish thoughts and most vivid recollections, and nothing could ever really dislodge him from the first place in her affections. An interesting page from her earliest memories may be reproduced. When she was three or four years old, her father was a Wesleyan Pastor in Cornwall, where his ministry led to a revival in which hundreds of souls found salvation. One night Katie was taken by her nurse to the meeting, and, on arrival, found herself before a flight of steps leading up to the gallery. Thinking herself quite a big girl, she wished to climb, but nurse, fearing the crowd, snatched her up and carried her to the top. At length they were inside, and what the child then saw and heard remained for ever vividly impressed on her imagination. The great building was crammed. Away down on the platform stood her father, with her mother sitting beside him. He was leading the singing, keeping time with his folded umbrella, and this was the chorus:

Let the winds blow high, or the winds blow low,

It's a pleasant sail to Canaan, hallelujah!

How well did the eager-hearted little maid enjoy that voyage, and how proud she was of her captain! The winds blew low and the sun shone upon her in those days. But it could not always be fair weather. Often since that far-off Cornish time have the winds blown high, and sometimes the mariner has felt herself tossed, chartless and rudderless, on dark tempestuous seas; but ever the winds have fallen, the sun has shone out again over the waves; and to how many tens of thousands has this daughter of music sung, with sweet variations, her father's song—"It's a pleasant sail to Canaan, hallelujah!"

The Booth children were left in no mist of doubt as to their future. There was an end, a point, a purpose, in their life. They grew up in an atmosphere of decision. Many children are made timid, diffident, ineffective by their training. They are constantly told how naughty they are, till they begin to believe that they are good for nothing. The Booth parents acted on a different principle. They had faith in their children and for their children. When Katie was still a little girl in socks, her mother would say to her, "Now, Katie, you are not here in this world for yourself. You have been sent for others. The world is waiting for you." What a phrase that was to send a little girl to bed with! There she turned the words over and over in her own mind. "Mother says the world is waiting for me. Oh, I must be good.... How selfish I was in taking that orange!" The lesson was worth £1000 to a child. In the development of Katie's mind and character her mother's influence was naturally very strong. The fellowship between them soon became peculiarly intimate, and it was the mother's joy to find her alter ego in the daughter who bore her name.

Katie's memories of her early London life were bound up with the Christian Mission. Hand in hand with her sister Emma, and often singing with her "I mean with Jesus Christ to dwell, will you go?" she walked every Sunday morning along the great road leading to Whitechapel. Ineffaceable impressions were made on her sensitive mind by the open-air preaching at Mile End Waste, Bethnal Green and Hackney; by the apostolic spirit of holy enthusiasm; by the Friday morning prayer-meetings, where the officers met alone to plead with God and wrestle in tears for more power. All this became the warp and woof of her own spiritual life, preparing her for her high calling. And, though she could not remember the day of her new birth, she clearly recalled several times when she consecrated herself, body and soul, to God. In a great whitewashed building in the East End her father preached on "The King's daughters are all glorious within," and she prayed that she might have the inner purity which would make her a child of God. From a meeting of Christian workers she ran home to her room, shut herself in, and deliberately gave her heart and life to Christ. She could not, perhaps, realise all that her covenant meant, but one thing she understood—that she was called to yield herself completely to do His will and to save souls.

There was plenty of laughter and fun in that home. The Booth children were all born with the dramatic instinct, and the spirit of the Christian Mission invaded the nursery. Not only were the great dramas of the Bible—Joseph and his brothers, David and Goliath, Daniel and the lions, and a score of others—enacted there, but the meeting and the penitent form, the drunkard and the backslider, the hopeful and the desperate case were all reproduced in the plays of the children. Katie and Emma brought their babies to the meeting, and the babies generally insisted on crying, to the despair of Bramwell or Ballington, who stopped preaching to give the stern order, "Take the babies out of the theatre," against which the mothers indignantly protested, "Papa would not have stopped, papa would have gone on preaching anyhow." But the dramatic masterpiece was Ballington dealing with an interesting case—generally a pillow—coaxing, dragging, banging the poor reluctant penitent to the mercy-seat and exclaiming, "Ah! this is a good case, bless him! ... Give up the drink, brother." That is a scene which is still sometimes re-enacted to the delight of new generations.

Jesus Himself watched the games of the children who piped and mourned in the market-place. Life is none the less strenuous for its interludes of mirth. Catherine, who was dramatic to the finger-tips, was very early mastered by a sense of the sacredness of duty. The moral ideal set before her was the highest, and her conscience was tremulously sensitive. She was oppressed with the sense of what ought to be, and inconsolable when she failed to attain it. A word of rebuke cut her like a knife, and she would sometimes weep far into the night if she thought she had put pleasure before duty. It is a great thing to make religion real to children, and especially to give them a sense of the obligation to please Christ in everything. Mrs. Booth found Katie ready to go all lengths with her, and even to outrun her, in her ideas of what was right and what was wrong for Christians. It is amusing to hear that when the mother was going out one day to buy new frocks for her little girls, Katie's words to her were not "Do buy us something pretty!" but "Mind you get something Christian!" and that when Mrs. Booth came home with her purchases, and Katie rushed downstairs to meet her, the child's first inquiry was, "Are they Christian?"

But the sense of duty may become morbid if it is not transmuted by love. Many servants of God never learn the secret which makes Christ's yoke easy and His burden light. They have to confess to themselves that they cannot say, "To do Thy will, O Lord, I take delight." It would have been strange if any of the Booth children had not learned the secret. Catherine discovered it early, learned it thoroughly, and it became in after years one of the hidden sources of her power. As a child she lived in union with Christ; she practised and felt the Real Presence; she understood that Christianity is a Divine Service transfigured by a Divine Friendship. In Victoria Park there was a shady alley where she was in the habit of walking, because Some One walked beside her! In Clifton, where she lived for a time, she had a tiny upper room in which she felt that she was never alone! That was her childhood's religion, which she never needed to change. She found it to be utterly independent of time and place, form and ceremony. In the glare of public life, in the storm of persecution, in the hour of temptation and danger, she had always a cathedral into which she could retire that she might find peace. She was spiritually akin with the Hebrew mystics who lived in the secret place of the Most High, who had at all times a pavilion from the strife of tongues. In her Neuchâtel prison she wrote some simple words which sent a thrill through the heart of Christian Europe:

Best Beloved of my soul,

I am here alone with Thee;

And my prison is a heaven,

Since Thou sharest it with me.

CHAPTER II

A GIRL EVANGELIST

When the heart is warm and full the lips become eloquent. Jesus expects each of His followers to testify for Him. His redeemed ones should need little persuasion to plead His cause. Every genuine conversion creates a new advocate for His side. Dumbness is one of the signs of unreality in religion. The sin of silence received due castigation, in public and in private, from the tongues of fire which the Spirit gave to William and Catherine Booth. Their children therefore learned that it is every Christian's calling to speak in season and out of season for Christ, to press His claims upon the willing and the unwilling alike. Katie, it appears, began among her little companions in the Victoria Park. Her old nurse still remembers how she would gather little groups about her and tell them of the Saviour's love. When she was in her twelfth year, she lived for some time with a family in Clifton, along with whom she attended the Church of England. One Sunday evening the Vicar, who had noticed her earnest gaze fixed on his face, sent for her that he might have a little talk with her. He asked her what she liked best in the Bible, and she answered "The Atonement." He was so struck by her intelligence that he offered her a children's class, which soon grew large. Week by week she talked to the little ones of sin and the Saviour. Letting story-books go, she went for their conversion. Having to return home on her twelfth birthday—the last day on which she could travel with a half-ticket—she told her mother of her great longing to continue her work among children. Her mother readily consented, and soon there was a weekly gathering of young folk in a downstairs room of the Gore Road house. After a while Katie had the assistance of her sister Emma, who was her junior by little more than a year. Tears were shed, confessions made, and lives changed in that room. And there two of the most brilliant evangelists of our time first learned to deal with souls. They were in every way kindred spirits. Long afterwards one finds Emma writing to Catherine: "We will always be 'special sisters.' We were Ma's two first girls, and were brought up side by side—and side by side we will labour and love till we stand with our children in her presence again before the Throne!"

Katie was thirteen when she first spoke in public. No one asked her to do it; she yielded to an irresistible inward impulse. Her eldest brother was conducting an open-air meeting opposite a low public-house at the corner of Cat and Mutton Bridge in Hackney. Katie was beside him, and whispered, "I will say a few words." Her brother was delighted, and she delivered her message with a directness and fluency which compelled attention and proved her a born speaker. Not very long after, she spoke in the hearing of the General, who wrote to his wife, "I don't know whether I told you how pleased I was with dear Katie speaking in the streets on Sunday morning. It was very nice and effective. Bless her!" "From this time," says Mr. Booth in a document of great importance, "she continued occasionally to speak in public meetings, but it was not until she was between fourteen and fifteen, when she was with me in Ryde, Isle of Wight, that I fully realised and settled the question. During that time my eldest son joined us for a few days, and, with another friend or two, held open-air meetings; on one of these occasions Catherine accompanied them, and her brother induced her to say a few words, which it appears fell with extraordinary power upon the listening crowd of men and others, such as usually comprise the visitors at these places. On their return my son described to me the effects of her address, but, not being fully emancipated from my old ideas of propriety, I remonstrated and urged such objections as I presume any other mother, consecrated but not fully enlightened, might have urged against her being thrust into such a public position at such an early age. My son, gazing at me with great solemnity and tenderness, said, 'Mamma, dear, you will have to settle this question with God, for she is as surely called and inspired by Him for this particular work as yourself.' These words were God's message to my soul, and helped me to pull myself up as to the ground of my objection. I retired to my room, and, after pouring out my heart to God, settled the question that henceforth I would raise no barrier between any of my children and the carrying out of His will concerning them, trying to rejoice that they, not less than myself, should be counted worthy to suffer shame for His name."

From that time Catherine's path was clearly marked out. While she continued her education, which included a special liking for French, she gradually undertook more and more public work. Her father's delight in her ripening powers found frequent utterance, and her companionship with him during the next six years of work is one of the most beautiful things in the literature of evangelism. "William," said Mrs. Booth about this time, "writes that he is utterly amazed at Katie; he had no idea that she could speak as she does. He says that she is a born leader, and will if she keeps right see thousands saved.... Praise His name that she can stand in my stead, and bear His name to perishing souls." After holding meetings in different parts of London, from Stratford and Poplar to Hammersmith, Catherine began, just before she was seventeen, to conduct evangelistic campaigns in many of the other great cities of England, sometimes lasting three weeks or a month. The largest building in the town densely crowded Sunday after Sunday, and frequently on week nights as well; hundreds of people to speak to about their souls' salvation every week; correspondence and travel; ceaseless labour and responsibility—these things absorbed all her energies of body and mind. She was but a frail girl, and suffered for a time from a curvature of spine, which compelled her to lie on her back in great weakness and pain. If she yet overcame, it is evident that she was "marvellously helped."

In 1876 Katie was one of the speakers at the annual Conference in the People's Hall, Whitechapel. As she appeared on the platform, she was described by her lifelong friend, R. C. Morgan of The Christian, as "a fragile, ladylike girl of seventeen, half woman, half child, a characteristic product of the Christian Mission, whose words fell like summer rain upon the upturned faces of the crowd." This was the Conference at which the epoch-making measure was adopted of appointing women evangelists to the sole charge of stations. Miss Booth was reserved "for general evangelistic tours."

It is interesting to glance through the numbers of the old Christian Mission Magazine and light upon brief reports of Catherine's work. From Hammersmith (1875): "Miss Kate Booth [age 16] spent a Sabbath with us, preaching twice with great acceptance. A large audience was deeply impressed, and some, we trust, were truly converted to God." From Poplar: "Mr. Bramwell and Miss C. Booth were with us. On the Sunday and Monday evening the hall was crowded, and some thirty souls at the two services sought salvation.... On Easter Sunday one sister's face was cut with a stone, and heavy stones fell upon some on many occasions of late; but we endure as seeing Him who is invisible." From Portsmouth: "Miss Booth, assisted by W. Bramwell Booth, commenced a series of special services, which God owned and blessed to the salvation of many precious souls. In the morning Miss Booth preached, and all felt it good to be there. Then a love-feast was conducted by W. B. Booth in the afternoon.... In the evening Miss Booth preached in the music-hall to upwards of three thousand people. The Spirit applied the Word with power, and seventeen broke away from the ranks of sin and enlisted under the banner of Jesus Christ." Again from Portsmouth, some months later: "We had a visit from Miss Booth with her brother Mr. Bramwell, and again the dear Lord blessed their labours in this town. Each service was fraught with Divine power; many trembled under the Word, and anxious ones came forward seeking forgiveness of sins, until the penitent-rail and vestry were filled with those who, in bitterness of soul, sought pardon and peace through Jesus."

From Limehouse (1876): "We had dear Miss Booth and her brother, and a blessed day. In the evening she preached with wonderful power, and ten or twelve came out for God. May they be kept faithful!" From Portsmouth: "Miss Booth's visit was made of the Lord a great blessing to us all. Very few who listened to her in the morning will forget how she pleaded with us to present our bodies a living sacrifice. Oh, may God bless her and make her a mighty blessing, for Christ's sake." From Whitechapel (1877): "An earnest appeal was made at one of our Sunday evening services by Miss Booth, from 'Run, speak to that young man.' Although in very delicate health, the Lord blessedly assisted her. The word was with power, and eleven souls decided for Jesus, among whom was the converted Potman. This young man was a leader in petty and mischievous annoyances. The genuineness of his conversion was evidenced by his giving up the public-house work to seek more honourable employment." From Middlesbro' (1878): "Miss Booth visited us for five days, and many blood-bought souls have been blessed and saved. Her first Sunday with us was a day of power, and it will not be soon forgotten by those present. It was a grand sight to see a large hall filled to the door with anxious hearers, while hundreds went away; but the grandest sight of all was to see old and young flocking to the penitent form." From Leicester: "Miss Booth's services may be summarised in the statement that she had twenty-two souls the first Sunday evening, and increasing victory thereafter right on to the end."

At Whitby there was a six weeks' campaign, organised by Captain Cadman. On the first Sunday "the large hall, which holds three thousand, was well filled, and in the after service many souls were brought to Jesus." On the second Sunday "Miss Booth was listened to with breathless attention. In the after service we drew the net to land, having a multitude of fishes, and among them we found we had caught a fox-hunter, a dog-fancier, drunkards, a Roman Catholic, and many others. In the week-night services souls were saved every night. The proprietor of the hall had got some large bills out announcing 'Troupe of Arctic Skaters in the Congress Hall for a week,' but he put them off by telling them it was no use coming, as all the town was being evangelised." The concluding services "drew great crowds from all parts of town and country, rich and poor, until the hall was so filled that there was no standing room." In a Consecration meeting, "After Miss Booth's address we formed a large ring in the centre of the hall, which brought the power down upon us; hundreds looked on with astonishment and tears in their eyes, whilst others gave themselves wholly to God.... Ministers, like Nicodemus of old, came to see by what power these miracles were wrought, and, going back to their congregations, resolved to serve God better, and to preach the gospel more faithfully in the future."

From Leeds: "Miss Booth in the Circus. A glorious month. Hard-hearted sinners broken down. Best of all, our own people have been getting blessedly near to God. On Sunday mornings love feasts from nine to ten.... It would be impossible to give even an outline of the various and glorious cases of conversion that have come under our notice through the month which is past. For truly Christ has been bringing to His fold rich and poor, young and old." From Cardiff: "The question, 'Does this work stand?' received a magnificent reply on Sunday. The crowds who filled the Stuart Hall, to hear Miss Booth, were the largest any one can remember seeing during all the four years of the Mission's history there." From King's Lynn: "Miss Booth's Mission. The town has had a royal visit from the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. There has been a great awakening, and trembling, and turning to the Lord. Whole families have been saved, and whole courts have sought salvation. Our holiness meeting will never be forgotten.... The work here rolls on gloriously. Not only in Lynn but for miles round the town it is well known that a marvellous work has been done and is still going forward."

All these battles and victories were naturally followed by the General with intense interest, and as often as it was possible he was at his daughter's side. Mrs. Booth joined them when they were opening a campaign together at Stockton-on-Tees, and sent her impressions to a friend. "Pa and Katie had a blessed beginning yesterday. Theatre crowded at night, and fifteen cases. I heard Katie for the first time since we were at Cardiff. I was astonished at the advance she had made. I wish you had been there, I think you would have been as pleased as I was. It was sweet, tender, forcible, and Divine. I could only adore and weep. She looked like an angel, and the people were melted, and spellbound like children." The General began to call her his "Blücher," for she helped to win many a hard-fought battle which he might otherwise have lost. When the rowdies threatened to take the upper hand at a meeting, he would say, "Put on Katie, she's our last card; if she fails we'll close the meeting."

"I remember," wrote her eldest brother, "a striking instance of this occurring in a certain northern town on a Sunday night. A crowd assembled at the doors of the theatre, composed of the lowest and roughest of the town, who, overpowering the doorkeepers, pressed into the building and took complete possession of one of the galleries, so that by the time the remainder of the theatre was occupied this portion of it represented a scene more like a crowded tap-room than the gallery of what was for the moment a place of worship. Rows of men sat smoking and spitting, others were talking and laughing aloud, while many with hats on were standing in the aisles and passages, bandying to and fro jokes and criticisms of the coarsest character. All this continued with little intermission during the opening exercises, and the more timid among us had practically given up hope about the meeting, when Miss Booth rose, and standing in front of the little table just before the footlights, commenced to sing, with such feeling and unction as it is impossible to describe with pen and ink,

'The rocks and the mountains will all flee away.

And you will need a hiding-place that day.'

There was instantaneous silence over the whole house; after singing two or three stanzas, she stopped and announced her text, 'Let me die the death of the righteous and let my last end be like His.' While she did so nearly every head in the gallery was uncovered, and within fifteen minutes both she and every one of the fifteen hundred people present were completely absorbed in her subject, and for forty minutes no one stirred or spoke among that unruly crowd, until she made her concluding appeal, and called for volunteers to begin the new life of righteousness, when a great big navvy-looking man rose up, and in the midst of the throng in the gallery exclaimed, 'I'll make one!' He was followed by thirty others that night."

CATHERINE BOOTH
(From a portrait by Edward Clifford, exhibited at the Royal Academy
and presented to Mrs. Booth)

Well might the General's hopes regarding the young soul-winner be high and confident. "Papa," wrote Mrs. Booth, "says he felt very proud of her the other day as she walked by his side at the head of a procession with an immense crowd at their heels. He turned to her and said, 'Ah, my lass, you shall wear a crown by-and-by.'"

With what desires and prayers the mother of this Wunderkind followed such a career is indicated by her letters. "Oh, it seems to me that if I were in your place—young—no cares or anxieties—with such a start, such influence, and such a prospect, I should not be able to contain myself for joy. I should indeed aspire to be 'the bride of the Lamb,' and to follow Him in conflict for the salvation of poor, lost and miserable man.... I don't want you to make any vows (unless, indeed, the Spirit leads you to do so), but I want you to set your mind and heart on winning souls, and to leave everything else with the Lord. When you do this you will be happy—oh, so happy! Your soul will then find perfect rest. The Lord grant it you, my dear child.... I have been 'careful about many things.' I want you to care only for the one thing.... Look forward, my child, into eternity—on, and ON, and ON. You are to live for ever. This is only the infancy of existence—the school-days, the time. Then is the grand, great, glorious eternal harvest."

Whatever gifts were the dower of the young evangelist, she refused to regard herself as different in God's sight from the poorest and meanest of sinners. If God loved her, He loved all with an equal love. That conviction was the motive-power of all her evangelism. A limited atonement was to her unthinkable. How often she has made vast audiences sing her father's great hymn, "O boundless salvation, so full and so free!" When she was conducting a remarkable campaign in Portsmouth, she found herself one day among a number of the ministers of the town, one of whom in his admiration of her and her work persisted in calling her one of the elect. This led to an animated discussion on election. Katie listened for a while, but lost patience at last, and, rising, delivered herself thus: "I am not one of the elect, and I don't want to be. I would rather be with the poor devils outside than with you inside." Having discharged this bombshell she flew upstairs to her mother. "Oh!" she cried, "what have I done?" When she repeated what she had said, her mother, whose laugh was always hearty, screamed with delight. Election as commonly taught was rank poison to the Mother of the Army. The doctrine that God has out of His mere good pleasure elected some to eternal life made her wild with indignation. When her son Bramwell was staying for a time in Scotland, she wrote him: "It seems a peculiarity of the awful doctrine of Calvinism that it makes those who hold it far more interested in and anxious about its propagation than about the diminution of sin and the salvation of souls.... It may be God will bless your sling and stone to deliver His servant out of the paw of this bear of hell—Calvinism."

One naturally asks what became of Catherine's education all this time. On this subject also Mrs. Booth held strong views. When her daughter was sixteen she wrote to her: "You must not think that we do not rightly value education, or that we are indifferent on the subject. We have denied ourselves the common necessaries of life to give you the best in our power, and I think this has proved that we put a right value on it. But we put God and righteousness first and education second, and if I had life to begin over again I should be still more particular.... I would like you to learn to put your thoughts together forcibly and well, to think logically and clearly, to speak powerfully, i.e. with good but simple language, and to write legibly and well, which will have more to do with your usefulness than half the useful knowledge you would have to spend your time over at College." When the principal of a Ladies' College, who had attended Mrs. Booth's meetings and been blessed, offered to receive Catherine and educate her gratuitously, Mrs. Booth, after visiting the College and breathing the atmosphere of the place, declined the tempting offer with thanks. Some will, of course, be disposed to question the wisdom of the mother's decision. It should not be impossible to combine the noblest learning with the most fervent faith. Yet every discipline must be judged by its fruits. How many Catherine Booths have hitherto been produced by Newnham and Girton?

Long after Catherine the second had left her home-land, she continued to receive letters from her English converts, and when, after many years, she resumed her evangelistic work in England, people whom she had never seen and never heard of before would come and tell her that they had been saved through her mission at this or that place. All these testimonies were like bells ringing in her soul. One out of many may be resounded. Writing to Paris in 1896, Henry Howard, now the Chief of Staff in the Army, said: "I have certainly never forgotten your Ilkeston campaign of sixteen years ago, when God made your soul a messenger to my soul. You led me towards an open door which I am pleased to remember I went in at, and during these many years your own share in my life's transformation has often been the subject of grateful praise."

CHAPTER III

THE SECRET OF EVANGELISM

After many victories at home, William and Catherine Booth began to look abroad. They realised that "the field is the world," and they longed to commence operations on the Continent. In the summer of 1881, with high hopes and some natural fears, they dedicated their eldest daughter to France. In giving her they gave their best. Delicate girl though she was, she had become one of the greatest spiritual forces in England. She swayed vast multitudes by something higher than mere eloquence. Wherever she went revivals broke out and hundreds were converted. There was a pathos and a power in her appeals which made them irresistible.

At the time of her departure she received many letters from friends whom she had spiritually helped, and who realised how much they would miss her in England. Nowhere had she done more good, nowhere could her absence create a greater blank, than in her own home. Her sister Eva wrote: "I cannot bear the thought that you are gone. You have always understood me. I hope one day to be of some use to you, in return for all you have done for me." And her brother Herbert wrote her: "You cannot know how much I felt your leaving. The blow came so suddenly. You were gone. Only God and myself know how much I had lost in you. I can truthfully say that you have been everything to me, and if it had not been for you I should never have been where and what I am spiritually at present. God bless you a thousand thousand times. Oh! how I long to be of some little service to you after all you have been to me.... Thousands upon thousands of true, loving hearts are bearing you up at the Eternal throne, mine among them. You have a chance that men of the past would have given their blood for, and that the very angels in Heaven covet."

There was no Entente Cordiale in those days, and at the thought of parting with Katie, and letting her go to live in the slums of Paris, Mrs. Booth confessed that she "felt unutterable things." In a letter to a friend she wrote: "The papers I read on the state of Society in Paris make me shudder, and I see all the dangers to which our darling will be exposed!" But if her fears were great, her faith was greater. Asked by Lady Cairns how she dared to send a girl so young and unprotected into such surroundings, she answered, "Her innocence is her strength, and Katie knows the Lord." And if Katie herself was asked to define Christianity, she answered, "Christianity is heroism!" For a girl of this spirit, was there, after all, anything so formidable in the French people? Was there not rather a pre-established harmony between her and the pleasant land of France, as her remarkable predilection for the French language already seemed to indicate? Is any nation in the world so chivalrous as the French? any nation so sensitive to the charm of manner, the magnetic power of personality? any nation—in spite of all its hatred of clericalism—gifted with so infallible a sense of the beauty of true holiness? Courage, camarade!

What were the ideas with which Catherine began her work in Paris? What was her plan of campaign? How did she hope to conquer? On these points let us listen to herself. "I saw," she says, "that the bridge to France was—making the French people believe in me. That is what the Protestants do not understand. They preach the Bible, they write books, they offer tracts. But that does not do the work. 'Curse your bibles, your books, your tracts!' cry the French. I have seen thousands of testaments given away to very little purpose. I have seen them torn up to light cigars. And the conviction that took shape in my mind was that, unless I could inspire faith in me, there was no hope. Only if Jesus is lifted up in flesh and blood, will He to-day draw all men to Him. If I cannot give Him, I shall fail. France has not waited till now for religion, for preaching, for eloquence. Something more is needed. 'I that speak unto thee am He'—there is a sense in which the world is waiting for that to-day. You may say that this leads to fanaticism, to all sorts of error; and yet I always come back to it. Christ's primary idea, His means of saving the world, is, after all, personality. The face, the character, the life of Jesus is to be seen in men and women. This is the bridge to the seething masses who believe in nothing, who hate religion, who cry 'Down with Jesus Christ!' What sympathy I felt with them as I listened to their angry cries against something which they had never really seen or known. They shout 'Jesuits,' but they have never seen Jesus. Could they but see Him, they would still 'receive Him gladly.' It is the priests' religion that has made them bitter. 'Money to be baptised! Money to be married! Money to be buried!' was what I heard them mutter. Ah! they are quick to recognise the comedian in religion, and equally quick to recognise the real thing. France is more sensitive to disinterested love than any nation I have ever known. France will never accept a religion without sacrifice.

"These were the convictions with which I began the work in Paris, and, if I had to begin it over again to-day, I would go on the same lines. When I knew what I had to do, my mind was at rest. I said, 'We will lay ourselves out for them; they shall know where we live, they can watch us day and night, they shall see what we do and judge us.' And the wonderful thing in those first years of our work in France and Switzerland was the flame. We lighted it all along the line. Wherever we went we brought the fire with us, we fanned it, we communicated it. We could not help doing so, because it was in us, and that was what made us sufferers. The fire had to be burning in us day and night. That is our symbol—the fire, the fire!

Seigneur, ce que mon coeur réclame,

C'est le Feu ...

Le seul secret de la Victoire,

C'est le Feu.

We all know what the fire is. It warms and it burns; it scorches the Pharisees and makes the cowards fly. But the poor, tempted, unhappy world knows by whom it is kindled, and says: 'I know Thee who Thou art—the Holy One of God!'

"That was what filled the halls at Havre and Rouen, Nîmes and Bordeaux, Brussels and Liège. We personified Some One, and that was the attraction. I have not the insufferable conceit to suppose that it was anything in me that drew them. What am I? Dust and ashes. But if you have the fire, it draws, it melts; it consumes all selfishness; it makes you love as He loves; it gives you a heart of steel to yourself, and the tenderest of hearts to others; it gives you eyes to see what no one else sees, to hear what others have never given themselves the trouble to listen to. And men rush to you because you are what you are; you are as He was in the world; you have His sympathy, His Divine love, His Divine patience. Therefore He gives you the victory over the world; and what is money, what are houses, lands, anything, compared with that?

"This was the one attraction. When I went to France I said to Christ: 'I in You and You in me!' and many a time in confronting a laughing, scoffing crowd, single-handed, I have said, 'You and I are enough for them. I won't fail You, and You won't fail me.' That is something of which we have only touched the fringe. That is a truth almost hermetically sealed. It would be sacrilege, it would be desecration, it would be wrong, unfair, unjust if Divine power were given on any other terms than absolute self-abandonment. When I went to France I said to Jesus, 'I will suffer anything if You will give me the keys.' And if I am asked what was the secret of our power in France, I answer: First, love; second, love; third, love. And if you ask how to get it, I answer: First, by sacrifice; second, by sacrifice; third, by sacrifice. Christ loved us passionately, and loves to be loved passionately. He gives Himself to those who love Him passionately. And the world has yet to see what can be done on these lines."

CHAPTER IV

CHRIST IN PARIS

In the early spring of 1881 Captain Catherine Booth and her intrepid lieutenants, Florence Soper, Adelaide Cox and Elizabeth Clark, who enjoyed the privilege of her example and training, began life in Paris. Later on they were joined by Ruth Patrick, Lucy Johns and others. Soon after they were joined by the General's youngest son, Herbert Booth, who is proud of having received his first black eye in assisting his sister during those early fights, and Arthur Sydney Clibborn, who lived a life of unparalleled devotion and heroism, and later became the Maréchale's husband. Years before Canon Barnett and his band of Oxford men were attracted to Whitechapel, these fresh young English girls settled in a similar quarter of the French capital. What quixotic impulses carried them thither? They had no social or political ideals to realise. They had not been persuaded that altruism is better than egoism, that the enthusiasm of humanity is nobler than the pursuit of pleasure or the love of culture. They were not weary of the conventions of society and seeking a new sensation in slumming. They were not playing at soldiers. But they, too, had their dreams and visions. They loved Christ, and they wished to see Christ victorious in Paris. Coming into a wilderness of poverty, squalor and vice, they dared to believe that they could make the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. They had the faith which laughs at impossibilities.

The first letter Catherine received from her father after she set foot in France breathed tender affection and ardent hope. "Oh, my heart does yearn over you! How could you fear for a single moment that you would be any less near and dear to me on account of your brave going forth to a land of strangers to help me in the great purpose and struggle of my life? My darling, you are nearer and dearer than ever.... France is hanging on you to an extent fearful to contemplate, and you must regard your health, seeing that we cannot go on without you. We shall anxiously await information as to when you make a start. Everybody who has heard you and knows you feels the fullest confidence in the result. Nevertheless I shall be glad for you to get to work, seeing that I know you won't be easy in your mind until you have seen a few French sinners smashed up at the penitent form."

With her own hand Catherine raised the flag at Rue d'Angoulême 66, in Belleville. Here was a hall for six hundred, situated in a court approached by a narrow street. The bulk of the audience that gathered there night after night were of the artisan class. Some were young men of a lower type, and from these came what disturbance there was. The French sense of humour is keen, and there were many lively sallies at the expense of the speakers and singers on the platform. Every false accent, every wrong idiom, every unexpected utterance or gesture was received with an outburst of laughter. But the mirth was superficial, and the expression on the faces of the tired men, harassed women, and pale children was one of settled melancholy. Catherine instinctively felt that what they needed was a gospel of joy; certainly not the preaching of hell, for did they not live in hell? These toiling sisters and brothers were the multitudes on whom Jesus had compassion.

Meetings were held night after night, and for six months the Capitaine was never absent except on Saturdays. Those were days of fight, and she fought, to use her own phrase, like a tiger. She had to fight first her own heart. She knew her capacity, and God had done great things through her in England. The change from an audience of five thousand spellbound hearers in the circus of Leeds to a handful of gibing ouvriers in the Belleville quarter of Paris was indeed a clashing antithesis. A fortnight passed without a single penitent, and Catherine was all the time so ill that it was doubtful if she would be able to remain in the field. That fortnight was probably one of the supreme trials of her faith. The work appeared so hopeless! There was nothing to see. But for the Capitaine faith meant going on. It meant saying to her heart, "You may suffer, you may bleed, you may break, but you shall go on." She went on, believing, praying, fighting, and at last the tide of battle turned.

The beginning of what proved a memorable meeting was more than usually unpromising. One of the tormentors, a terrible woman, known as "the devil's wife," excelled herself that night. She was of immense size, and used to stand in the hall with arms akimbo and sleeves rolled up above the elbows, and with one wink of her eye would set everybody screaming and yelling. On this occasion there was not a thing that she did not turn to ridicule. The fun grew fast and furious, and some of the audience got up and began to dance. The meeting seemed to be lost; but by a master-stroke the leader turned defeat into victory. Through the din she cried, "Mes amis! I will give you twenty minutes to dance, if you will then give me twenty minutes to speak. Are you agreed?" A tall, dark, handsome ouvrier, in a blue blouse, who had been a ringleader in the disturbances, jumped up and said, "Citizens, it is only fair play;" and they all agreed. So they had their dance, and at the end of the appointed time the ouvrier, standing with watch in hand, cried, "Time up, citizens; it is the Capitaine's turn!" The bargain was kept. Everybody sat down, and an extraordinary silence filled the place. Not for twenty, but for an hour and twenty minutes the leader had the meeting in the hollow of her hand. When the audience filed out, the tall ouvrier remained behind, and Catherine went down to where he was sitting in the back of the hall. With his chiselled face and firm-set mouth, he looked like a man who could have seen one burned alive without moving a muscle.

"Thank you," said the Capitaine, "you have helped me to-night. Have you understood what I have been saying?"

"I believe that you believe what you say."

"Oh! of course I believe."

"Well, I was not sure before." With a sigh he added, "Have you time to listen?"

"Yes, certainly."

It was midnight and they were alone. As he began in softest tones to tell the story of his inner life, she felt the delicacy of the soul that is hidden under the roughest exterior. He said, "I had the happiest home in all Paris. I married the woman I loved, and after twelve months a little boy came to our home. Three weeks after, my wife lost her reason, and now she is in an asylum. But there was still my little boy. He was a beautiful child. We ate together, slept together, walked and talked together. He was all the world to me. He was the first to greet me in the morning, and the first to welcome me in the evening when I came home from work. This went on till the sixth year struck, and then...." His lips twitched, and he turned his face away. His hearer softly said, "He died." He gave a scarcely perceptible nod, and smothered a groan. "And then," he continued, "I went to the devil. Before the open grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery, with hundreds of my comrades about me, I lifted my hand to heaven and cried, 'If there be a God, let Him strike me dead!'"

"But He did not strike you dead?"

"No."

"He is very gentle and patient with us all. And now you have come here to-night. Does it not seem to you a strange thing that you out of all the millions of France, and I out of all the millions of England should be all alone together here at midnight? How do you account for it? Isn't it because God thought of you, and loves you? ... Do you ever pray?"

"I pray? Oh, never! Perhaps I prayed as a child, but never now."

"But I pray," said the Capitaine, and, kneeling down, she prayed a double prayer, for herself as well as for him. She wanted this man's salvation for her own sake and the work's sake. For weeks she had been fighting and praying for a break, and she felt as if on the issue of this wrestling for a single soul depended the whole future of the work in France. While she prayed for his salvation from sin she was silently praying for her own deliverance from doubt and fear and discouragement. And both prayers were heard. When she opened her eyes, she saw his face bathed in tears. She knew that his heart was melted, and she spoke to him of the love of God.

"But I have hated Him. I have hated religion; I have come here to mock you; I have called you Jesuits."

"Yet God loves you."

"But why did He allow my wife to lose her reason? Why did He take my child if He is love?"

"I cannot answer these questions. You will know why one day. But I know He loves you."

"Is it possible that He can forgive a poor sinner like me?"

"It is certain."

Émile was won. Some nights afterward he gave his testimony, and for seven years he always stood by the Maréchale. He was her best helper. When he used to get up to speak, there was immediate attention. "Citizens," he would say, "you all know me. You have heard me many times. This God whom I once hated I now love, and I want to speak to you about Him."

After this, conversions became frequent. The mercy-seat was rarely empty. One of the first French songs of Catherine's composition contained the most curious idioms:

Quand je suis souffrant,

Entendez mon cri, etc.

—Donnez moi Jesus.

But she sang it with such feeling that it was the means of the conversion of a clever young governess, who became one of her most devoted officers.

Then another striking conquest was made. One night a rough fellow, partly drunk, approached the Capitaine and said a vile word to her in the hearing of "the devil's wife," who dealt him a blow that sent him reeling across the hall crying, "You dare not touch her, she is too pure for us!" (Elle est trop pure pour nous!) Catherine rushed between them and stopped the fight. Thus "la femme du diable" was won, and from that time she got two or three others to join her in forming Catherine's bodyguard, who nightly escorted her and her comrades through the Rue d'Allemagne, which was a haunt of criminals, and saw her safe at the door of her flat in the Avenue Parmentier.

When Baron Cederström was seeking local colour for his painting "The Maréchale in the Café,"[1] he drove down with his wife to a meeting in the Rue d'Angoulême. As they approached the hall, the Baroness caught sight of some of the faces and took fright.

[1] This painting is now in the picture gallery of Stockholm. The artist, as is well known, afterwards married Madame Patti.

"Go back, go back!" she shouted to the coachman.

The Baron tried in vain to reassure her.

"Give me my salts!" she cried, feeling as if she would faint. "I never saw such faces in my life. They are all murderers and brigands." To Catherine, who came out to welcome her, she exclaimed, "I am sure the good God won't send you to Purgatory, for you have it here!"

"You have nothing to fear," was the answer; "I am here every night." But as the Baroness was led up to the front seats, she still cast scared looks at the people she passed.

Some of the politically dangerous classes did give trouble for a time. Knives were displayed and some blood was shed. An excited sergeant of police declared one night that half the cut-throats of Paris were in that hall, and by order of the authorities it was closed. Soon, however, the meetings were again in full swing, and when Catherine's eldest brother Bramwell, her comrade in many an English campaign, paid her a flying visit three months after she left home, he was delighted with all that he saw. "The meetings," he wrote, "are held every night. The congregations vary from 150 to 400.... On Sunday, at three, I attended the testimony meeting, which is only for converts and friends. About seventy were present. Miss Booth took the centre, and gathered round her a little company. I cannot describe that meeting. When I heard those French converts singing that first hymn, 'Nearer to heaven, nearer to heaven,' I wept for joy, and during the season of prayer which followed my heart overflowed. Here, using another tongue, among a strange people, almost alone, this little band have trusted the Lord and triumphed.... Then testimonies were invited.... I wept and rejoiced, and wept again. I glorified God. Had I not heard these seventeen people speak in their own language of God's saving power in Paris during those few weeks! I require all who read this to rejoice. I believe they will. Remember how great a task it is to awaken the conscience before Christ can be offered; to convince of sin as well as of righteousness; to call to repentence as well as faith.... On the following night 300 were present.... Miss Booth stepped off the platform as she concluded her address, and came down, as so many of us have seen her come down at home, into the midst of the people. Her closing appeal seemed to go through them. Many were deeply moved. Some of those sitting at the back, who had evidently come largely for fun, quailed before one's very eyes, and seemed subdued and softened. God was working."

Later in the year the new headquarters on the Quai de Valmy were opened. Here there was a hall for 1200. No other form of religion could draw such an assembly of the lowest class of Parisians as nightly met in it. The men came in their blouses, kept their caps on their heads, and—except that they abstained from smoking, in obedience to a notice at the door—behaved with the freedom and ease of a music-hall audience. But the earnest way in which most of those present joined in the hymns proved that they were not mere spectators, and it was astonishing that many rough, unkempt, and even brutal-looking men soon learned to sing heartily without using the book.

There were a hundred converts in the first year and another five hundred in the second. Paris herself began to testify that a good work had been begun in her midst. On the way to and from the hall in the Rue d'Angoulême Catherine, who by this time had begun to be endearingly known as the Maréchale, the highest military title in France, used often to meet a priest, to whom she always said "Bon jour, mon père." One day he paused and said, "Madame la Maréchale, I want to tell you that since you began your work in this quarter the moral atmosphere of the whole place has changed. I meet the fruits everywhere, and I can tell better than you what you are doing." She felt that God sent her that word of encouragement.

One of her letters of this time indicates what kind of impression her work was making. "There is a man," she wrote, "who has attended our meetings most regularly. He listens with breathless attention, and sometimes the tears flow down his cheeks. He was visited, and sent me 70 francs for our work, with a message that he desired to see me. I saw him, and he gave me 80 more, with the words 'Sauvez la jeunesse'! ('Save the young!') I found him very dark and hopeless about himself.... The next week he again called me aside in the hall, put 50 francs into my hand, saying he hoped soon we should have a hall in every quarter of Paris. 'Save the young people!' he again said. I said 'Yes, but I want to see you saved.' 'That will come,' he said, and left the hall. Last Sunday afternoon, I noticed him weeping in a corner of the hall, as our young people were witnessing for Jesus, and, after the services, he asked if he might speak to me for two minutes; this time he handed me 60 francs, telling me to go on praying for him. He has lived a bad life and is troubled with the thought of the past."

It began to be commonly believed that the Maréchale could work certain kinds of miracles. A woman who had attended the meetings, and been blessed in her soul, became convinced that the English lady had power to cast out devils, and one day she brought a neighbour to the physician of souls, introducing her with the remark, "She has not only one but seven devils." The new-comer had a frightful face. She was so drunken, immoral and violent that nobody could live with her. Yet she, too, had a soul. The Maréchale made her get down on her knees, put both her hands on her head, and prayed that the devils might all be cast out. "She's now another woman," was the testimony soon after borne by all her neighbours.

One of the surest indications of the success of the work in Paris is found in the fact that, before the end of the first year there was a general demand for a newspaper corresponding in some degree to the English War Cry. That was a memorable day on which the Maréchale and her officers sat in their Avenue Parmentier flat, like a coterie of Fleet Street journalists, gravely discussing their new venture. It was indicative of the holy simplicity of the editor-in-chief that she thought at first of changing The War Cry into Amour. She did not realise the sensation which the cry "Amour, un sou!" would have created in the Boulevards. Her proposal was overruled, but her second suggestion, to call the paper En Avant, was received with acclamation. This was a real inspiration. The paper duly appeared in the beginning of 1882, and has gone on successfully ever since. The shouting of its name in the streets set all the world and his wife a-thinking and a-talking. What if the Man of Nazareth is after all far ahead of our modern philosophers and statesmen, and if this handful of English girls is come to lead us all forward to true liberty, equality and fraternity?

The reports of the work in France were received with feelings of gratitude at home. To "My dear Kittens"—a family pet-name—her brother Bramwell wrote: "We are more than satisfied with your progress. The General says that so far as he can judge your rate of advance in making people is greater than his own was at the beginning. I am sure you ought to feel only the liveliest confidence and greatest encouragement all the time." And to "My darling Blücher" the General himself wrote, "I appreciate and admire and daily thank God for your courage and love and endurance. God will and must bless you. We pray for you. I feel I live over again in you. We all send you our heartiest greetings and our most tender affection. Look up. Don't forget my sympathy. Don't trouble to answer my scrawls. I never like to see your handwriting because I know it means your poor back. Remember me to all your comrades."

"I feel I live over again in you." The thought was evidently habitual in the General's mind. "He bids me tell you," wrote Emma, "that you are his second self." The resemblance was physical as well as spiritual. With her tall figure, her chiselled face, her aquiline nose, her penetrating blue eyes, Catherine became, as time went on, more and more strikingly like her father. One of her sons, who saw her stooping over the General the day before he died, said that the two pallid faces were like facsimiles in marble.

CHAPTER V

FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD

In the autumn of 1883 the Maréchale suddenly leapt into fame as a latter-day Portia, brilliantly and successfully pleading in a Swiss law-court, before the eyes of Europe, the sacred cause of civil and religious liberty. The land of Tell, the oldest of modern republics, has always been regarded as a shrine of freedom. It has shown itself hospitable to all kinds of ideas, even the newest, the strangest, the most anti-Christian, the most anti-social. There is a natural affinity between free England and free Switzerland.

"Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,

One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice:

In both from age to age thou didst rejoice;

They were thy chosen music, Liberty."

 

In the "Treaty of Friendship" between Great Britain and Switzerland, drawn up in 1855, it was agreed that "the subjects and citizens of either of the two contracting parties shall, provided they conform to the laws of the country, be at liberty, with their families, to enter, establish themselves, reside and remain in any part of the territories of the other." Yet the presence of a few English evangelists in Switzerland evoked a storm of persecution in which the first principles of religious liberty were as much violated as ever they had been in the days of the Huguenots.

When the Maréchale and some comrades accepted an urgent invitation to Switzerland, she little thought that she would be the heroine of an historical trial. She went to preach the gospel. She observed the laws of the land, and respected the religious susceptibilities of its people. When she entered Geneva, she published only one poster, and that after it had been duly visé; she allowed no processions, banners or brass bands in the streets. Her only crime was that she sought to gain the ears of those who never entered a place of worship, and that she marvellously succeeded.

If good order was not always maintained at her meetings, it was not her fault, but that of the authorities who refused to do their duty. History repeats itself. As in ancient Thessalonica during the visit of St. Paul, so in modern Geneva, some citizens, "moved with jealousy, took unto themselves certain vile fellows of the rabble, and gathering a crowd set the city on an uproar." The ringleaders of the disturbance were paid by noted traffickers in vice, who were themselves often seen in the meetings inciting the audience to riot. One of the first converts, a student, confessed that he had got twenty francs a night, and as much whisky as he could drink, to make a row.

The Department of Justice and Police chanced at that time to have as its president a Councillor of State, M. Heridier, who thought it right not to punish the offenders but to banish their victims. In a sitting of the Grand Council he said, "We have been petitioned to call out a company of gendarmerie to protect these foreigners, and to prevent brawls and rows. I will not consent to take such a step. There are already eight police agents in these places every evening who have a very hard time of it.... These agents might be doing more useful work elsewhere, and I am just about to withdraw them." That meant handing over the strangers to the tender mercies of the mob. It was a gross breach of the laws of hospitality and chivalry as well as of the constitution of a free country. The city of Calvin did not know the day of its visitation.

The Maréchale and her comrades began their meetings in the Casino on December 22, 1882. The hall was crowded, and soon there was raging a great battle between the powers of light and darkness. A disturbance had evidently been organised. A band of students in coloured caps, who had come early and taken possession of the front of the galleries and other prominent positions, were on their worst behaviour. The first hymn was interrupted by cries and ribald songs, and the prayer which followed was almost drowned. But the Maréchale was never more calm and confident than when facing such music. At every slight lull in the storm, she uttered, in clear, penetrating tones, some pointed words which pierced many a heart. Within an hour she not only had subdued her audience but was inviting those who desired salvation to come forward to the penitent form. Scoffers of half an hour ago left their places, trembling under the sense of guilt, and as they knelt down the Maréchale sang, in soft notes, the hymn:

Reviens, reviens, pauvre pécheur,

Ton Père encore t'attend;

Veux-tu languir loin du bonheur,

Et pécher plus longtemps?

O! reviens à ton Sauveur,

Reviens ce soir,

Il veut te recevoir,

Reviens à ton Sauveur!

A strange influence stole over the meeting, hushing the crowd into profound silence, and the Spirit did His work in many hearts.

The Maréchale conducted a similar service the following night, and on Christmas Eve she faced an audience of 3000 in the Salle de la Reformation. Its composition was entirely to her mind, for she was never so inspired with divine pity and power as when she was confronting the worst elements of a town. The theatres, the cabarets, the dancing saloons, the drinking dens, and the rendezvous of prostitution had poured their contents into the hall. Socialists who had found refuge in Geneva—men of many nationalities—came en masse. A large part of the audience were so entirely strangers to the idea of worship or of a Divine Being, that the sound of prayer called forth loud derisive laughter, with questions and cries of surprise and scorn.

But the soldiers of Christ, clad in armour of light, were more than a match for the powers of darkness. Many a winged word found its mark, and the after-meeting in the smaller hall, into which three hundred were crowded, was pervaded by a death-like stillness, in which many sought and found salvation. Some of the ringleaders of the disturbance had pushed their way into this room; but they remained perfectly quiet, evidently subdued and over-awed, with an expression on their faces of intense interest, which showed that they felt they were in presence of a reality in religion which they had not before encountered. The Maréchale sang her own hymn "Je viens à Toi, dans ma misère," and many joined in the chorus:

Ote tous mes péchés!

Agneau de Dieu, je viens a Toi,

Ote tous mes péchés.

One of those who were melted by the words wrote: "I was like the demoniac of Gadara. I may say I was possessed; I was chained for fifteen years to a frightful life.... It was then that you came. I was at first astonished; then remorse seized me. Then followed a frightful torment in my soul—a real hell. I resolved to put an end to it one way or another. Yet I thought I would go and hear you once more. I had been in darkness and anguish since the day of the first meeting. No word had I been able to recall of that day's teaching, except the words of the sacred song 'Ote tous mes péchés' (Take all my sins away). These sounded in my heart and brain through the day and the sleepless night—these and these only. Bowed down with grief and despair, again I came to the Reformation Hall, and to the after-meeting. The first sounds which fell on my ear were again those very words, 'Ote tous mes péchés,' and then you spoke on the words, 'Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow'; you seemed to speak to me alone, to regard me alone—and I felt it was God who had sent me there to hear those words."

Hundreds of such letters were written. Evidence came from all sides of blessing received in many homes, of wild sons reclaimed, of drunkards and vicious men transformed by the power of God, of light and joy brought into families over which a cloud had hung. Not only anarchists and prodigals, but students of theology and the children of pastors had their lives transformed. In a meeting for women only, at which 3000 were present, the daughter of Pastor Napoleon Roussel began the new life. Her brother had been one of the converts in the first meeting in the Reformation Hall. Mlle. Roussel was to be the Maréchale's secretary for five years, and accompany her in a great American tour. A divinity student who attended a "night with Jesus" on New Year's Eve, wrote: "I passed a long night of watch, which I shall never forget. Since then I am ever happy, and can say 'Glory to God' every hour of the day."

But as the tide of Divine blessing rose, the tide of human hatred also rose, and in the beginning of February the "exercises" of the Army were by Cantonal decree forbidden. A week later, the Maréchale, with a young companion, Miss Maud Charlesworth, now Mrs. Gen. Ballington Booth, was expelled from the Canton of Geneva. During her six weeks in the city she had been used to bring about probably the greatest revival which it had witnessed since the days of the Reformers.

One of the most eminent lawyers of Geneva, Edmond Pictet, who had himself been greatly blessed during those stirring weeks, helped her to draw up an Appeal (Recours) to the Grand Council. He found, however, that she needed but little help, and often remarked that with the warm heart of an evangelist she combined the lucid intelligence of an advocate. When the Council of State had deputed two or three of its members to hear her on the subject of her Appeal, she came back to Geneva under a safe-conduct to meet them. In the course of the interview, at which the British Consul in the city was present, the leading Councillor said, "You are a young woman; it is not in accordance with our ideas and customs that young women should appear in public. We are scandalised (froissés) by it." The rejoinder which he received was so remarkable a defence of "the Prophesying of Women" that we give it in full.

"Listen to me, I beg of you, sir. It is contrary, you tell me, to your sense of what is right and becoming that young women should preach the Gospel. Now, if Miss Charlesworth and I had come to Geneva to act in one of your theatres, I have no doubt we should have met with sympathy and approval from your public. We could have sung and danced on your stage; we could have dressed in a manner very different from, and much less modest than, that in which you see us dressed; we could have appeared before a miscellaneous audience, men and women, young and old, and of every class; members of the Grand Council, M. Herdier himself and others, would have come to see us act; we should have got money; Geneva would have paid ungrudgingly in that case; and you would all have sat and approved; you would have clapped your hands and cheered us; you would have brought your wives and daughters to see us, and they also would have applauded. There would have been nothing to froisser you, no immorality in all that, according to your ideas and customs. The noise (bruit) we should have thus made would not have caused our expulsion. But when women come to try and save some of the forty or fifty thousand of your miserable, scoffing, irreligious population who never enter any place of worship, when they come with hearts full of pity and love for the ignorant and sinful, and stand up to tell the glad tidings of salvation to these rebels, this mob, among whom many accept the tidings with eager joy—then you cry out that this is unseemly and immodest. You would not bring your wives and daughters to hear us speak of Jesus, though you would bring them to hear us if we danced and sang upon the stage of your theatre. Now you have expelled us; but still there are those multitudes in Geneva who are dark, lost, unsaved; and you know it. There they are; they exist. What will you do with them? Say—what will you do? Are they not a danger? Does not their lost condition cry out against you?"

The Councillor was not only silenced, but sank into his chair in a state of temporary lapse. For the moment, at least, the reality of the picture presented to him had touched his heart.

Nevertheless the Maréchale's Appeal was rejected, and M. Pictet wrote to her: "The wretched storm of anger and prejudice which you witnessed and which your friends deplore so much, has not blown over by any means. I, for one, despair of ever seeing my fellow-citizens properly understand what religious liberty and respect of other people's opinion mean,—therefore the only course left to the Army seems to be the one indicated in St. Matthew x. 23! You have done your duty, you cannot be expected to do more than Paul and Barnabas did (Acts xiii. 51)."

Meantime the enemies of righteousness rejoiced. The theatrical paper of Geneva complimented the authorities upon the expulsion. "Our theatre," it said, "has lost a formidable rival, and the crowd is beginning to find its way back to us."

At that critical time it was not only the civil but the spiritual leaders who were weighed and found wanting. Injustice could scarcely have been pushed so far had not the Churches sanctioned it by their attitude of silence or open hostility. Many religious people took the side of the persecuting government and the godless populace. The bitterest pamphlet against the Armée du Salut was written by Madame la Comtesse de Gasparin, whom the delighted mob hailed as "a Christian if ever there was one." But the most strange and humiliating fact of all was that the Swiss branch of the Evangelical Alliance resolved, after due deliberation, to refrain from uttering a single word in defence of religious liberty. No wonder that a number of its most influential members sorrowfully withdrew from its fellowship.

Banished from Geneva, the Evangelists found refuge for a time in Neuchâtel. Coming on the scene just after the authorities had forbidden evening meetings, the Maréchale gave notice of a morning one to be held the next day. The hall was filled, and the meetings went on every morning and afternoon, all through the week.

At six o'clock on Sunday morning the roaring of a crowd of roughs coming up the street reached the ears of those who had already gathered inside the hall. While the noise grew louder and louder, the Maréchale said to her officers, "Wait here and pray; I will go and meet them." On stepping outside the door, she was at once surrounded by rough fellows in their shirt sleeves, armed with sticks and forks and stones, who began to demand what she wanted in their town, and poured upon her the senseless accusations of the tap-rooms.

"Go away!" cried one, "we've got our pastors."

"My friend," was the reply, "you don't do them much credit."

"Here is my god!" (Voilà mon dieu!), said another, pulling out his pipe and brandishing it in the Maréchale's face.

"You will need another when you come to die."

"You want our money!" shouted a third.

"What do you say? You say that again! Say it! You dare not, you do not believe it, you know that it is a lie." And taking this man by the shirt collar, the Maréchale led him into the hall and up to the front seat, where he sat listening most attentively for two hours. Two rows of penitents sought pardon at the close of the meeting.

In June the Grand Council of Nauchâtel voted for the suppression of the Armée du Salut; and Zurich and Canton du Vaud soon followed suit. It then became clear that the only hope of getting these unconstitutional decrees rescinded lay in disobeying them. Jurists who were consulted held that this was the best way to compel the authorities to retrace their steps. Many Swiss converts were ready to suffer for conscience' sake, but the Maréchale resolved that she would herself, as a subject of Queen Victoria, assert her right to worship God on Swiss soil. In a new form she would raise the Apostle's question, "Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman and uncondemned?" The interest of the situation was heightened by the fact that it was now a woman's question. All the spirit of the modern world was in the Maréchale's bold declaration, "I am a British citizen."

After working for some months in the south of France, she returned to Nauchâtel and deliberately infringed the Cantonal decree. On the afternoon of Sunday, September 9, she conducted a meeting at Prise-Imer, in the Jura forest, some five miles above the lake. In a letter to England she described the scene. "It was a day never to be forgotten. Long before the hour the people met, and we had upwards of 500 who had come out of Nauchâtel to praise God. The weather was beautiful. After so much trouble, fatigue and a long journey, we could meet to talk of the things of God. Hearts and voices rose together, and it cheered me much to look into the faces of our brave soldiers. There was no mistaking their zeal and determination to go forward."

While the hymn "Come, Thou burning Spirit, come" was being sung under the tall pine trees, a sentinel who had been stationed on the outskirts of the forest announced that the Prefect in his carriage, attended by sixteen policemen, was approaching. The Maréchale gave the news to the audience, and called on everybody to be calm and confident.

"Take no notice. We shall have a glorious meeting all the same."

The gendarmes found the congregation kneeling, and formed a ring round it, the Prefect himself taking his stand close to the Maréchale. He and his followers were all overawed. For over two hours they listened as men spellbound. They heard the Maréchale pray for the Government, for the nation of Switzerland, for themselves. They heard her speak of the end and aim of the Armée du Salut—"to save the lost, to make all thieves, drunkards, outcasts, and plagues of society peaceful and loyal citizens, through the power of Jesus to lead the nations to God." Then they heard the testimonies of converted criminals, one of whom told of his three years' imprisonment. Pointing to a plain-clothes detective, he said, "That policeman over there knows me; he took me to jail; but now I am a changed man." No wonder that the Prefect of Police was profoundly impressed. At the end of the service, he took out his warrant with trembling hands, and stammered—

"I have here ... I ought..."

"Yes, I know. You have a decree for my arrest. Why didn't you give it me before?"

"Well, I could not."

"Yes, a higher Power than man was here to restrain you."

He could not withhold his tribute of admiration. "This is a magnificent work, if it does but last. You do nothing but good. I beseech you not to hold me responsible for this act. I, like others, had judged you without seeing or hearing you."

He had, however, to obey his orders. The Maréchale and Captain Becquet, one of her officers, were put under arrest. As they were leaving that pleasant place, she exclaimed, "How strange that we are not to be allowed to worship God in these beautiful woods! What a pity to see them standing silent and unused!" To some of those who heard her voice that Sunday evening, the spot was for ever holy ground. In the audience was a young Switzer, Constant Jeanmonod, one of nature's gentlemen, who found salvation on that day, gave himself body and soul to God, and afterwards became one of the Maréchale's most devoted friends and comrades in many a hard campaign. He is now at the head of the work in Belgium.

The Maréchale and Captain Becquet were brought down to Nauchâtel and conducted to the house of M. Comtesse, President of the Council of State, who said to them, "You are my prisoners, and it is my duty to have you locked up this night." The Maréchale, however, had just received a telegram begging her to attend the funeral of a brave young Geneva convert, who had breathed a dying request that she should speak at his grave-side. She asked permission to fulfil this sacred duty, and was liberated on bail of 6000 francs.

Next morning a service was held in the garden of the farmhouse near Geneva where Charles Wyssa had died, and there the Maréchale found a lifelong friend. Mrs. Josephine Butler was present, and gave a brief address which lived long in the memory of those who heard it. Having spoken of her profound sympathy with the work of the Armée du Salut in Switzerland, she made a moving reference to the fact that she had lost her only and dearly-loved daughter, whom she had named Evangeline in the hope that her life would be dedicated to evangelisation. One fatal evening, when, the mother returned home after a long journey, her little daughter came running downstairs to meet and welcome her. In her extreme eagerness to see her mother again, the child forgot all danger, slipped over the staircase balustrade, and was taken up crushed and unconscious. In less than an hour her gentle spirit had fled.

"At the coffin of that child," said Mrs. Butler, "I consecrated my life to the relief of my suffering and oppressed brothers and sisters. My great desire was that she should become a preacher of the Word of God. And now," added the mother, throwing her arms round the Maréchale, "by another new coffin I have found my long-lost daughter, an Evangelist chosen and blessed of God." When the Maréchale had daughters of her own, she called the eldest Catherine Evangeline and the youngest Josephine.

From that garden the company moved to the churchyard, where the Maréchale spoke on the beautiful words, "Who are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they?" Just as John Wyssa, the younger brother of Charles, was throwing a handful of earth on the coffin, and murmuring the words "Au revoir, mon frère," the Mayor of the Commune approached in order to arrest Miss Booth. At this juncture Col. Clibborn interposed, saying, "Sir! this is a funeral." He was a coarse, brutal fellow, very different from the Prefect of Police in Neuchâtel. The mayor not heeding was putting his hand upon Miss Booth's arm, when she turned upon him with flashing eyes, and said, "Hands off! this is holy ground! Don't you see that we are in the presence of the dead? I finish this service, and then will speak with you."

When the funeral rites were ended, the Mayor thought his turn was at last come. He was about to proceed with the arrest, when the Maréchale still objected.

"You can't arrest me!"

The Mayor stared in bewilderment.

"I say you can't arrest me!"

"May I ask why?"

"Because with the best will in the world I can't go to two prisons in two Cantons at the same time. I am due in Nauchâtel."

The Mayor saw that she was right, and retired crestfallen.

The Maréchale returned to Nauchâtel and surrendered to her bail. The iron gates of the grim jail closed upon her. The imprisonment was shared by her faithful lieutenant, Kate Patrick, who refused to leave her.

It was twelve days before the trial came on. The Maréchale was in delicate health, and frequently became sick. The hunger-striking and forcible feeding of these latter days would soon have killed her. She tried to eat, but had little appetite, and what little she had was destroyed by the garlic in the food. Mice disturbed her nights and in the early morning the odours which came from the passages were insupportable. The only way in which she could get any relief was by putting her face between the iron bars of the window and breathing the air which came up from the lake. She was always thankful that her face was thin and just went through the cold bars.

One morning at five or six o'clock she was awakened by happy voices singing dear familiar choruses outside the prison walls. She was very ill, but she dragged herself from her hard bed to the window, waved her hand, and cried "Amen!" Then she attached her handkerchief to a bar, and let it flutter like a flag. The signal was received with shouts of "Amen, Maréchale—be of good cheer—hold on—hallelujah!"

As the time passed, she was thrown in upon herself, and went through a great soul-struggle. She had lately been the victim of a stinging article, grossly ignorant and cruelly unjust, which had appeared in a religious paper, written, rumour said, by the wife of a Swiss pastor. It had accused her of unwomanliness, immodesty, and vanity. She made the painful discovery that she could not yet say, "None of these things move me." The poisoned arrows had gone deep, forcing tears from her eyes and attacking her peace of mind. Chancing to notice a little slate hanging on the wall of her cell, she took it down and began to write on it all the accusations which her enemies might bring against her, asking herself as she did so, "Could you write your name and say you accept that, and that?" Her conscience compelled her to answer "No, there are some things which I could not endure." She was appalled as she thought of more and greater trials which God might ask her to undergo. He might deprive her of health. He might send her to Japan. He might take away her reputation and make it impossible for her to defend herself. Could she bear such things? No, she could not yet sign her name under the terrible words she wrote. With sorrow she put the slate back in its place, and for two days it hung against the wall with its list of cruel things which she could not accept. But during those days she pondered and prayed. She rebuked her doubts and fears. How could she ever distrust her Lord, who had led her with such infinite tenderness? How imagine that He would ever lay upon her more than He would give her power to bear? She soon crept up close to His arms, and realised that nothing was really unbearable except doubt. Taking her slate down, she read over again all that she might be called upon to suffer, and signed "Catherine Booth." Then the Angels of God filled the prison cell; the peace and joy of heaven flooded her soul; and from that hour her communion with her Lord was so sweet that she kissed the walls of her dungeon before she was led forth to her trial.

On that day (September 19) she wrote her exquisite prison song, "Best beloved of my soul," and sent it to her father. It was sung, while she was still in prison, at a great meeting for prayer, in Exeter Hall, at which Mrs. Butler spoke. It was first written in French, the language in which she now habitually thought, and translated by herself into English. The latter is well-known, and many readers will be glad to have the French.

O Toi que mon âme adore,

Je ne suis pas seule ici,

Car je T'y retrouve encore,

Et je suis au ciel ainsi,

Ma vie est à Ton service,

Je T'appartiens sans retour;

Corps et âme en sacrifice,

Je Te suivrai nuit et jour.

Combattons dans la souffrance,

Et les yeux baignés de pleurs;

Bien près est la délivrance,

Voici l'Homme de douleurs!

Sa voix chasse ma tristesse,

Mon chagrin s'est dissipé;

Je chante avec allégresse,

Mon cachot est transformé!

Au milieu de la tempête

Rien ne peut troubler ma paix;

Son amour que rien n'arrête

Peut me garder à jamais.

Le combat est dur, terrible,

L'enfer rugit contre nous;

Mais l'Armée est invincible:

Avec Dieu nous vaincrons tout.

 

During the twelve days of her imprisonment the Maréchale received many letters of sympathy and good cheer from Swiss friends, whose words proved to her how deep and real had been the work of the Armée du Salut in the country. One of the most interesting was signed by seventy-two mothers, who bore glad testimony to the conversion of their sons and daughters, and two more were signed by a number of wives praising God for the conversion of their husbands.

More intimate letters came to Catherine from home, all breathing warm love, tender solicitude, and ardent hope that good would come out of evil. "I quite see with you," wrote her mother, "as to God's hand being in all this, and it appears that when communities or nations get sodden in sin and darkness, there is no way of arousing them but by such a flashing of the truth in their midst as will provoke persecution. God wants the attention of the people, and this is the best way to secure it, no doubt.... Perhaps you are right about pleading your own cause, only you should have some one at your elbow who knows the law. You will not be up on points of law, I fear, otherwise I have no doubt that God will give you what you should say. I feel it a great thing to have a child in prison for Jesus' sake; there could be only one greater, namely to be there myself; but one would hardly have thought it possible in this age. How true that the devil hates real saints as much as ever he did, and that the spirit of persecution only needs the real presence of the Spirit of God to call it forth.... That the Lord comfort and keep you and reveal Himself to you more and more and make you a mother of nations, prays your loving and sympathising mother.

"Catherine Booth."

The next letter admirably reveals both the father's and the General's heart. With the deepest concern for his beloved daughter there is combined a lively sense of the fact that his enemies are overreaching themselves and doing him and his cause the greatest possible service. He wrote: "My darling, no one can tell the anxieties we have all gone through concerning you during this week.... We were awakened by telegraph messenger with a wire from Geneva to say 'Blücher detained till trial. Patrick with her—cared for.' The last sentence fills us with relief. We interpret it to mean Patrick is with you as your secretary or maid, and you have all your wants supplied and no hardships.... Enclosed is this morning's Times. All the papers have notices of it, so that it is flying all over the world. If you do not suffer in your health, I don't care. It will all work for good. But your health is of more importance to me in my estimation than all Switzerland. If you can only get assurance of this! I am all uncertain whether this will reach you. There will be a storm directly and no mistake if these Swiss go on at this rate. We all send you all our heart's love and heaps of prayers and sympathy. God bless and keep you! Remember me to Lieut. Patrick.

"Your affectionate father,

"William Booth."

Mrs. Bramwell Booth, who as Miss Florence Soper had been one of the Maréchale's first comrades in Paris, wrote her: "I feel as if you had mounted away to a land where I can call you 'Katie' no more. But I will say, and I do say in my heart of innermost hearts, my Saint Catherine, counted worthy to suffer.... If only I could beseech you to remember that your health is everything. This is the dawning of a glorious morning in your work—the forerunner of a glorious victory. Will you send some word through Patrick of the whole truth—just let me know—-just your Flo—if it is as bad as a prison cell, and is it doing your body the least bit of harm? ... I wish you could know, in your solitude, how we all love you—I wish the breezes over the lake could bring you some whispers of what we have said of you. The glorious God is our God for ever and ever, and His chariots of fire are with you—His invisible army is around you. Your own Flo. 20. 9. '83."

Her sister Emma, who was now at the head of the Training School at the Congress Hall, wrote: "What can be said at such times compared with what is felt? I will not attempt to write. I am praying. All hearts here hold you up ceaselessly—your example is before us! In the night and the day I am with you—in your sorrow I find your joy in what is to come out of all. 'They know not what they do,' and out of their very efforts to hinder and stop God's work shall it spread beyond restraint. The loss is great, my precious sister, but the reward will be infinitely greater, and in both you will have been allowed to share. It would have been easier to be with you, but I'll fight harder than ever in my corner here. Filled with deepest sympathy and yearning desire for His kingdom to come in Switzerland! Devotedly, Emma. PS. It is your back I most tremble for—your poor back! I wonder if you have pillows. Bless your dear little Pattie [Miss Patrick]. Oh, each moment I am with you! JESUS is—He does love and choose and will honour you!"

Among those who wrote to the prisoner was George Railton,[1] whom she regarded almost as an elder brother. He had lived with the family during her childhood, and when she was a girl of twelve and onwards she used to get up at six in the morning—slipping downstairs on her bare feet in order not to awaken mother—to have a Bible lesson with him. She always regarded the talks in those morning hours as among the great formative influences in her life. Railton, who became the General's first commissioner, watched her career with profound and affectionate interest. He wrote on September 25: "Dear Maréchale Prisoner, I have just come from that tremendous prayer meeting [in Exeter Hall, held as a protest against her imprisonment], one of the biggest and best this world has ever seen.... The way the volleys burst out at the right time and went ringing all round the Hall sounded splendid. And the sight of thousands standing up to give themselves to God, hundreds and hundreds for foreign service, and all for service somewhere, was magnificent.... My impression is that as they [the Swiss] have outraged law all along they may very likely do it when it comes to sentence.... God only knows what is coming next, but anyhow we shall win."

[1] Since these pages were written, this remarkable man has died—as he wished—with his armour on, and been "promoted to glory."

Towards the end of her imprisonment Catherine wrote: "God will open the door for us through this storm. My will is God's. All I want is to accomplish His desire for the world. Do not worry at all. Jesus is here. There is such wonderful victory ahead that all my cry is, Lord, make us equal to it!—ready in every way! Ever fighting, in jail as well as on the field, following on to know Him. I have been looking at that wonderful sight—Calvary. I must ever live in sight of it."

The trial took place at Boudry on Saturday the 25th and Monday the 27th September. It excited the greatest interest in Switzerland and far beyond it. The Journal de Genève said: "This prosecution at Boudry has an immense political significance in the highest sense of that word, and the decision, whatever it may be, will take its place in the history of Republican rights." Even the most sanguine scarcely hoped for the acquittal of the accused. But the unexpected happened, and the triumph of righteousness was a woman's triumph.

The Public Prosecutor spent much time in proving that Salvationists were mountebanks and fanatics. A young Englishwoman had flung an insult in the face of the Grand Council, accusing them of violating the constitution. Her contempt for the law was the more surprising as the English never rebel against the law, however unjust it may be (!). If the Armée du Salut was not suppressed they would have to enlarge their asylums. Christ, who was, perhaps, the most religious man who ever lived, favoured private rather than public prayer. Silent communion with God was better than getting up and shouting "I am saved!" While the accused placed herself above the law, the Queen of England was obliged to submit to Acts of Parliament. Having not only ignored, but deliberately violated the decree, the Salutistes must bear the consequences, and no doubt they would be happy to receive the crown of martyrdom!

On the second day of the trial, after a speech in the defence by M. Monnier, the Maréchale rose to plead her own cause. Though she had passed twelve days in prison, and sat many hours in the suffocating atmosphere of a crowded court-house, she overcame her exhaustion, her spirit subduing the frail body. She had been accustomed to face great crowds since she was sixteen, and she was never more completely master of herself or her audience than she was in that critical hour. Her voice was never clearer, nor her manner more commanding. Her brother Herbert, who was in the court, said he was amazed at her power. As she pleaded the cause of religious liberty, her hearers felt that she had not come to be judged but for judgment upon them all. Some extracts will serve to indicate the quality of her speech.

"What is the need of the Armée du Salut? Allow me to read a passage from one of your own journals: 'Cantonal Governments will see with alarm the flood of demoralisation rising menacingly higher and higher; and instead of seeking to destroy the causes of this deluge, they only take away the remaining dams.' It is needless to enlarge on the necessity for an Armée du Salut in the face of these facts.

"The Prosecutor has said, in speaking of the work, that it moved the entire population, and that there must be a cause for this. He has reason to say so. I agree with him; there must be a cause, far deeper than any that has been mentioned here to-day. It is at this cause that we strike—which exists in the heart of man.

"As to our aim, we are trying to bring these people who outrage your laws, who fight against God, to the feet of Him who alone can change them, to the only hope that exists for them, the Saviour of the world. We work, we live, we suffer to do this. This is our one hope and object—to bring the world to the great Deliverer, Jesus Christ.

"Ah! The question of all questions, the question which every intelligent man ought to face, is—What are we to do with the masses? If they are not reached by the power of the Gospel, a day will come when they will turn round against you, occasioning terrible trouble and disorder, and awful will be the consequences. Then, gentlemen, you will have reason to regret your action in this matter. If these disturbers are capable of manifesting such hatred, such rage against citizens who pray to God, they will also be capable of manifesting the same rebellious spirit against any other opinions, or any other law, which may not please them.

"We have not made the people like this. Bear in mind that we have not created this terrible state of barbarism, which was let loose around that hall, and which has made my heart bleed many times in witnessing. Who is responsible for this? We cannot be, for we have only been in your town a few months.

"Although we have suffered terribly through misrepresentations that have been wilfully circulated about us, we are not discouraged! We know that truth and justice will soon triumph. I love Switzerland all the more for what we have endured (Applause). A little while and Switzerland will love us. We shall win thousands to righteousness, peace and heaven.

"The Prosecutor referred to the Queen saying that even she was subject to the decrees of Parliament, but that I placed myself above her in refusing to become subject to the decrees of the Grand Council. There is no parallel between Her Majesty and myself. No act has been passed to forbid her praying in a wood, or I think Her Majesty would have something to say on that subject (Sensation).

"One word in conclusion. You may punish us; you may imprison us; you may prosecute us as long as you are permitted; but what you cannot do is to stop this work—to suppress it. Beware what you do for your country's sake, for Jesus Christ's sake. Take care that in banishing us you do not banish the light, that you do not banish Jesus Christ, and in that great day when you are called to give an account you be found guilty of fighting against God."

Such pleading was irresistible. The jury had not the courage to enforce the law. To their honour, they let themselves be swayed by considerations of equity. They found that while the accused had violated the decree she had not acted with "culpable intention." In consequence of this verdict she was acquitted. The sentence was received by her friends in the court with a burst of fervent "Amens." And the Maréchale deserved the thanks of every Swiss patriot. By her bold and successful claim of right she had made history. At a time when the old Republic was forgetful of its noblest traditions, untrue to itself, she restored its ideal. She vindicated for every man and woman freedom to worship God according to their conscience. She brought back to the hills and valleys of Switzerland the crown rights of the Redeemer.

No one appreciates or speaks more enthusiastically to-day than the Maréchale of the devotion and bravery of her comrades, Colonel Clibborn first and foremost, and spiritual children at this time.

CHAPTER VI

THE SOUL OF FRANCE

It is not easy to reach the ideal and spiritual elements of character which are masked by the light laughter or the polite scorn of the typical Frenchman, who believes, or pretends to believe, that religion is only for priests and women. At the opening of a new hall in the Rue Oberkamff, a big fellow shook his fist in the Maréchale's face and said, "An Englishman may accept religion—a German—or a heathen, but a Frenchman—never!" "O God, if You exist, save my soul, if I have one!" was the prayer of another man, who had attended the meetings for some time, and who indicated with a strange pathos the bewildered state of mind into which many of the educated, as well as the ignorant, had sunk. "Let there be no mistake," said a French writer, Louise de Croisilles; "it is by no means unnatural that the Army should have taken root in India, or even under Africa's burning sun, but that it should be accepted in Paris, the centre of free-thought and unbelief, that is a thing incredible."

Nevertheless the Frenchman suffers from "the malady of the ideal," even as other men. His heart is restless until it rests in God, and it is sheer faithlessness to say that he cannot be won by the grace of God. If he is sceptical, it is because he has no conception of the fascinating loveliness of Christianity; if he is a scoffer, it is because he has never come in contact with human lives which suggest to him the infinite goodness of God.

After the Maréchale's great legal victory, which was really a triumph of the Gospel over its enemies, she returned to Paris and quietly resumed her tasks. She was in nowise changed, though public opinion regarding her was undoubtedly changed. She had become a person of note. Editors of newspapers and magazines sent reporters to her meetings at the Quai de Valmy, or at the new headquarters in the Rue Auber, and found piquant accounts of her sayings and doings to be excellent copy. Visitors to the city came to hear her. Artists begged for the honour of painting her portrait for the Salon, an honour which she steadily refused. The son of Garibaldi invited her to visit Italy, where, he said, she would be welcomed and not treated as she had been in Switzerland. None of these things, however, moved her. As she had promised God in her prison that she would never be depressed by the calumnies of men, so now she prayed that she might never be elated by their praises. With a stronger faith and a more ardent hope, she plunged again into absorbing work. One sees that she worked with her imagination; that she obeyed her intuitions; that she proved the originality and inventiveness of love; and her efforts were so rewarded that 1884 was her annus mirabilis, at the end of which she wrote: "Can you imagine the bewilderment that comes over me when I sit down to convey some idea of the wonderful way in which God has led and helped us during the year? ... It is not too much to say that during the past twelve months we have passed from the position of a small and almost unknown mission to that of a great spiritual power, recognised and felt throughout France and Switzerland."

A series of fresh inspirations contributed to this result. The first of these was the visitation of the cafés of Paris. One winter night the Maréchale and two young comrades, Blanche Young and Kate Patrick, went out with shawls on their heads, and made their way to one of the boulevard cafés. The leader passed the door, and passed it again. She turned to her lieutenants and said, "You have never known your Maréchale till now; you see what a coward she is!"

THE MARÉCHALE IN THE CAFÉ
(From the painting of Baron Cederström,
now in the Picture Gallery of Stockholm)

"No, no, no!" they both protested.

At last she put her hand on the door, pushed it open, and went in. A man in a white apron was selling drink. Going up to him, she said, "May I sing something?"

He stared open-mouthed.

Trembling from head to foot, she repeated, "I should like to sing something."

"Very well!"

She began:

"Le ciel est ma belle patrie,

Les anges y font leur séjour;

Le soldat qui lutte et qui prie

Y sera bientôt à son tour."

 

While she sang, Blanche chimed in with her guitar and her second voice. As they proceeded, the smoking, drinking, and card-playing ceased, and every face was turned towards them. They sang on:

"En marche, en marche,

Soldats, vers la patrie!

En marche, en marche,

Soldats, vers la patrie!"

 

When they had finished the hymn, the Maréchale thanked her audience, adding that they could hear her again at Rue Auber Hall; and that she knew a Friend, of whom she wished to tell them. As she and her comrades turned to walk out, the man in the white apron bowed, as if they had done him a service.

"May I come another time?" said the Maréchale.

"Certainly, Mademoiselle!"

They visited sixteen cafés that night, and when she got home she felt she had never been happier in her life, never nearer to Jesus. She had tried in her own way to obey His command, "Let your light shine before men." Since then, thousands and thousands of cafés have been visited, and much good has thus been done. Let one case stand for many.

There used to be a well-known resort in Paris called the Café de l'Enfer, the windows and walls of which were painted with lurid scenes representing hell. There rouged and powdered singing girls entertained people of the dare-devil type, who sat drinking and smoking at little tables. From an open coffin a grim skeleton stared at everybody, and prizes were given for the most audacious witticisms about death. The more outrageous the blasphemies were, the louder were the roars of applause with which they were received.

But the Maréchale and her young lieutenants, "armed in complete steel"—the panoply of God—were not afraid of the gates of hell. Having obtained permission to sing, they mounted the estrade, and rendered some of their most attractive part-songs. The café orchestra at once took up the airs as if it had been paid to do so. The songs of Paradise were well received even in those regions, and then the Maréchale, stepping forward, made a little speech:

"You are very clever here. You play very well. But it is a rôle that you play. Your laughter is not real; I can tell you the source of true laughter and true joy. This is not life, it is death; I can tell you what real life is. This is not peace, it is an effort to drown care and forget trouble; I can tell you the secret of peace. Let me give you my address, where you can hear us sing again."

It required as much moral courage to deliver that speech as to face all the jurists of Helvetia.

When the Maréchale was leaving, she passed a lovely girl, in whose ear she whispered, "What are you doing here? you ought to be in bed."

"Who will give me a supper or a bed?" the girl plaintively asked.

"I will!" exclaimed the Maréchale; "come with me, quick!"

She hailed a cab, put the girl in, and drove away. The poor child, eighteen years of age, had a sad tale to tell. She had noble blood in her veins, and her mother and she had both been cruelly wronged. The Maréchale led her to Christ and ultimately secured for her a position in one of the best colleges of America, where she was universally respected. Not long after she was installed there, she sent the Maréchale 500 francs, with the pathetic message, "Save another, as you saved me."

The Maréchale's methods naturally gave offence to those who had not the courage to adopt them. Late one night she and some comrades were standing at the door of a theatre while it was emptying. One of her young officers cried in clear, penetrating tones, "Prepare to meet thy God!" The words seemed to send an electric shock through the gay crowd. Thereupon a gentleman came forward to the Maréchale and said:

"Mademoiselle, you are evidently young girls of good family, and I am scandalised to see you here at this hour. I, too, occupy myself with preaching, but I am shocked at your behaviour."

"Really?" she replied, "and I am scandalised that you are scandalised. You profess to believe the Gospel. How are you to get these indifferent tens of thousands to hear of the Saviour? They won't come to listen to you. What more natural and more in accord with the principles of Jesus, than to go to them and compel them to hear?"

Ten minutes after, the gentleman returned and slid a five-franc piece into her hand, saying:

"It is you who are right!"

It was impossible for young girls to be in the boulevards towards midnight without being sometimes molested. But the leader would instruct her soldiers thus: "If they say the vilest things in the world to you, remember that is only the outside. Think of their souls which cost so dear to Christ. Say one or two sentences that will remain with them, and pass on."

More than once she proved this method of dealing to be very effective. In a corner of one of the boulevards a "gentleman" approached her and asked for a rendezvous. She looked at him in silence, which he took for consent.

"Where?" he asked, taking out his pencil and note-book.

"Devant le Trône de Dieu!" (Before the Throne of God!)

The man took to his heels, and ran.

That went all over France. One day the same sword will pierce the conscience of every roué in the universe.

The Maréchale's second original idea was to begin a series of Conférences (Meetings) in the fashionable Lecture Hall of the Boulevard des Capucines. Her increasing popularity only deepened her sense of duty to the city of her adoption, and suggested to her the possibility of bringing Christ to the Boulevards as well as to the Villette. She could not live in gay Paris without profoundly pitying the thoughtless, infidel Rich, for whom it is proverbially so hard to enter the kingdom of heaven. Her idea of attacking the central stronghold of the world's fashion and pleasure was a daring one for a woman, especially for a woman of the Maréchale's youthful years. About this time she read the Life of Napoleon, and found in his astonishing career many lessons for an evangelist. She was especially struck by his faith in his star, and his contempt for "ce bête de mot, impossible." She knew that she had something better to trust than a star, and stronger reason for holding that all things are possible.

Her new plan of campaign was great alike in its conception and its execution. From the very first the Conférences for men were astonishingly successful, and they were renewed year after year. The audiences were very different from a Keswick or Northfield congregation, in which the preaching is mostly to the converted. Perhaps the best parallel to the Maréchale's Conférences is to be found in Professor Drummond's Sunday evening meetings for students (men only) in the Oddfellows Hall, Edinburgh, which, by a strange coincidence, began in the same year. Having enjoyed the friendship of both these evangelists, and listened to them many scores of times, I have often been forcibly struck by their likeness to each other, and for power to rivet the attention and inspire the confidence of cultivated men of the world I have met nobody to compare with them.

When the Maréchale came to hold her first Conférence, the proprietor of the hall entered her ante-room and advised her to deliver a sort of ethical lecture, rather than speak of salvation, as it was the worldly fashionable public who would assemble, and he was afraid they would not be pleased if they heard too much of religion. But they listened with rapt attention while she spoke on the text "Without God and without hope in the world." Of the second Conférence Galignani's Messenger said, "The subject, 'The Greatest Sin,' was treated with a force of religious arguments which made a visible impression on many persons in the audience. The attention was deep and respectful. The Hall was crowded, and the doors were vainly besieged by a numerous crowd, the greater part of whom remained outside the open windows to hear the address." Another leading journal said, "She has profoundly astonished the citizen sceptic, who has been out of the habit of being astonished for a long time."

Her brother Ballington was present at a later meeting, and described the impression made on himself as one who did not know French. "I had to cover my face more than once while our Maréchale spoke. Her words, though in a foreign language, yet seemed understandable. The Spirit does not confine Himself to words alone. He speaks through the countenance, and eyes, and hands—He fills the Temples of His children. Three things struck me in that meeting: first, the rapt attention and interest of the audience, and there seemed few who were not impressed at the close; second, the manner in which the people remained in the after-meeting on to the end; third, the utter amazement, and yet perfect solemnity of the congregation, when some sinner came up through the aisles to seek peace, even rising as though to make sure that what they saw was a fact." Then he adds—and one notes the beautiful transition—"I was also present and took part in meetings at Paris in which the very poorest were attending by hundreds, and at which I saw men of the vilest caste and life getting saved." No small part of the Maréchale's charm lay in her flexibility and adaptability—her Pauline habit of becoming all things to all men—to the rich and to the poor, to the wise and to the unwise—that she might win some.

At a later time the Maréchale delivered somewhat similar addresses in other cities of France such as Nîmes, Marseilles, Havre, Rouen, Lyons—and she was everywhere astonished to find that the French, who seem the most thoughtless, are yet among the most thoughtful people in the world. The result of such Conférences as these cannot be tabulated. For one thing, they made the Maréchale more than ever a mother-confessor and spiritual director. The thoughts of many hearts were revealed to her at private interviews of which no record was kept, and in letters, one of which may be given as containing the secret of the Maréchale's power—her possession of Christ's Spirit—a second as showing the abyss of doubt from which many of her hearers had to be rescued, and some others as indicating the wonderful success which often attended her efforts.

The first runs as follows: "I am glad you accept my request to visit my home. You will consider the intention in asking you to come under my roof, like One before you, who had the noblest Heart which ever beat for mankind. It is because this Great Heart has possessed yours to the degree of rendering you like Himself, that you have profoundly moved me and made me better. Certainly I will speak with you on these vital subjects, but I need more and more the moral and spiritual atmosphere of the meetings: this opens the heart and at the same time deadens the opposition of the mind. Oh, if the latter could hold its peace! ... I have lived much in solitude, and naturally these problems have been always with me. I may say that the Infinite has tortured me for twenty years: lately I have arrived at the conclusion that one can know nothing. So I shall be glad to speak with you and at length."

A second correspondent wrote: "Your marvellous faith, your simple and powerful eloquence so deeply moved me that I cannot but thank you. I thank you as an artist, as a sincere admirer of beautiful work, of great characters; I thank you as a man blasé, sceptical, benumbed and deadened. As a child I adored Jesus, and now, after having thought much and suffered infinite pains which you cannot understand, I have said adieu to faith and also adieu to hope! I have become one of those you call sceptics. Ah! do not say 'terrible' sceptic, but unfortunate, pitiable, unhappy sceptic. You are, Madame, a great, beautiful, generous heart, and if ever earnest good wishes have been worth anything, I have cherished them for you, your work, and those who fight by your side. You will believe me, an unbeliever, who envies you, admires you, and ideally loves you."

A third of her hearers wrote succinctly: "Two of your meetings have sufficed to destroy infidel convictions of twenty years' standing."

A fourth, after testifying to his respect and confidence, said: "What your soul yearns for is conversion. You would like me to add, I am converted. I cannot say that I am. But you have made an incredible impression on me, and you have made me love the Christ I never loved." He evidently could not rest there, and soon he sent a second letter, describing with thankfulness how one night, in prayer and agonising mental controversy, he had received a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, which had finally slain his doubt and made him a believer in God.

The twofold purpose of the Conférences was to conquer the feelings and tastes, the etiquette and conventionality, of people of the world, and to awaken faith in unbelievers. One day a very bad man thrust some bank-notes into the Maréchale's hand, saying while he did so:

"I believe in nothing."

"You believe in nothing, and yet you give me these bank-notes!"

He replied, "I believe in you, and I wish you had a hall in every town and hamlet and village in my country."

"Pull out your watch," she said. "I believe in your watch, I believe that it keeps time, but I do not believe in its maker! ... I am naturally just as great a lover of ease and comfort as you are. The motive power—la force motrice—of my life, the spring upon which everything turns, is the love of Christ. You believe in me; believe in Him who has made me what I am."

The Maréchale's third new departure was perhaps the most important of all—the founding of an École Militaire, or school for cadets, somewhat similar to the Military School at Clapton, over which her sister Emma at that time presided. When Catherine first went to France, a very noted Protestant pastor said to her, "You will never get three Frenchwomen to live together in peace." But at the Training Home, Avenue Lumière 3, in the Villette, where the Maréchale lived all the year round with her officers, there were as many as forty or fifty young women—among whom, at one time, a Princess's daughters were side by side with scullery maids—and the harmony, the love, the spirit of "never mind me," which prevailed was one of the miracles of the work in France.

To the training of company after company of young cadets—French, Swiss, English, Belgian, German, Italian and Russian—the Maréchale gave a great deal of her time and strength, her pattern being ever our Lord's own training of the Twelve. All obeyed her joyfully and without question. She realised intuitively that the highest thing in training is not discipline, but something which discipline follows as light follows the sun. That something is the spirit, the atmosphere, which men and women are brought into and which transforms them. In the École Militaire it was the selflessness of people who did not care what became of them. Where that spirit takes possession of any one, there is no need to say to him, "You shall do this or that." The law of the spirit of life makes him obedient without constraint.

The spirit of the Maréchale's leadership is somewhat expressed in Garibaldi's call to arms often quoted by her. His followers understood his motives, realised his disinterestedness, saw that rewards and honours were nothing to the man who was seeking the Liberty of Italy. Therefore they loved him so much that they would have died for him. There was no marked difference between the Staff and the Field, and yet there was discipline, obedience, devotion such as the world has scarcely ever seen equalled.

That was the spirit which the Maréchale sought to impart to the École Militaire. Everything else—how to study the Bible, how to conduct meetings, how to use the voice, how to deal with souls—was subordinated by her to the one thing needful—the spirit of sacrifice. "We are sometimes told," she once wrote, "that our uniforms, our young women speaking in public, our tambourines and our processions bring contempt upon religion. It is a mistake. That which is the laughing-stock of the world and of hell is a religion without sacrifice. People will never believe in Christians who, while professing to be disciples of Him who had not where to lay His head, live in luxury, seek first the comfort of their family, the health and position of their children, and let their souls perish for lack of that Gospel which they profess to believe. There is the secret of the unbelief of France; that is what makes the young who are in search of the truth cry 'Comedy!' On the other hand, those faces which radiate the light from on high, those young people who rise up to give themselves to God instead of the world, those men and women who declare, with a sincerity which leaves no room for doubt, that they consecrate their life to God for the saving of souls, are more eloquent than the most beautiful discourses."

The faces of officers and cadets who surrounded the Maréchale on her platform undoubtedly constituted a large element of her power. Renée Gange, the Socialist, wrote a fine appreciation of her and her comrades, in which she confesses that what she finds "remarkable among these young girls, pretty as well as plain, is the complete absence of the ordinary feminine expression.... In looking with searching, scrutinising eye at the faces enveloped in this ugly bonnet, we have not deciphered the least vestige of this expression, neither timidity, nor awkwardness, nor restlessness, nor the consciousness that people are thinking of them. Nothing. These faces are the free faces of free creatures."

One day a French Baron, who had received a great blessing at the Maréchale's Conférences, said to her in the great hall at the Rue Auber, "What you lack here is pictures; for instance, the saints. Those beautiful faces, with their sweet celestial expressions, diffuse a sentiment of reverence and quietness, and they would form such a beautiful background to you. You should have the Virgin, and Saint Francis, and many others. That is what you lack in all your halls: could we not do something?"

"Baron," said the Maréchale, "will you come here next Sunday evening?"

"Yes, certainly. Are you going to speak?" He never lost a chance of hearing her.

"Yes; be sure you do not miss it."

Next Sunday evening she marshalled her little group of officers. She filed them in, men on one side, women on the other. She stood in the midst of them and spoke. At the end of the meeting the Baron came forward.

"Maréchale," he said, "you have no need of pictures. Those figures! those faces! they are your pictures."

Her friend Frank Crossley was greatly struck by this incident. He wrote: "I was specially interested in the remark upon inspired faces. I once heard Rendel Harris say of the biblical critics, that they might tear the volume into shreds, but never could rub off the light of God from the faces of His people."

One of the cadets of the École Militaire was Constance Monod, daughter of the great Protestant preacher whose hymn, "Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow," is known everywhere. Having received salvation and rich spiritual blessings from attending the Maréchale's meetings, she became one of her most devoted officers and warmest friends. She was one day put up to speak to a very rough audience of lewd, low men, and one of the roughest and lewdest of them said, with tears in his eyes:

"Oh, what extraordinary purity in that face!"

That was the expression which gave so many of the cadets their power in the cafés and in the slums. It was what they were, far more than what they said, that did the work.

Among the new cadets there was always a great heart-searching. Were they sure of their vocation? Had they a due sense of the seriousness, the sacredness, the responsibility, the opportunity of the call to work and fight for God? If they were not right there, everything was wrong. But if they had really left the world, and come to learn to know GOD, He revealed Himself to them, and it was marvellous how rapidly they grew in that heart-knowledge which is always so much deeper than head-knowledge.

Whenever troubles and difficulties arose, the Maréchale's method was not to evade them, but to grip things at the bottom. An invitation to "come and have a cup of tea" would lead to earnest talk and prayer, by which she nipped many an evil in the bud. These "personals," as such interviews were called, were remembered ever afterwards with gratitude.

The conquest of self, the triumph of the spirit of love, was illustrated in small matters as well as in great. One day a Frenchman, François, refused to clean the boots of another cadet, who was a German.

"I clean a German's boots? Never! never!" The Maréchale quietly said:

"The boots will be cleaned."

"Never by me!"

"By you."

"Well, not now, let them wait!"

The whole day passed, and the boots were not cleaned. The Maréchale knew what François suffered inwardly, and got him alone in the evening.

"Jesus died for the Germans," she said.

His lips remained tightly pressed. He suffered, and she suffered with him. After a moment's silence he burst into a torrent.

"We have endured too much! Think of the siege of Paris. That beast of a Bismarck! Oh! our country has suffered. Clean a German's boots? Never!"

He raved. The Maréchale was quiet and listened for a time. Then she said:

"All that may be true; but you are going to have a greater victory over the Germans than ever the Germans won over you. The triumph which they had over France was a flea-bite in comparison."

She got his ear, and talked to him of the highest things. The victory which Jesus won on Calvary over Pilate and the Priests and Judas, this must be François' victory.

"Go back to your trade unless you can win this victory. This makes an apostle of François, and nothing else. These boots are only a detail, but they have brought to light something in you that is hindering the great victory."

And so they talked. She would not force him. Next morning she gave a lecture, at the end of which he came into her room and sat down. There was a moment's silence, and then he collapsed, falling all of a heap and sobbing like a child.

"Maréchale," he said, "I will clean the boots!"

Such training inside the École made the cadets ready for any conflict outside, and the triumph of the spirit of love was in some instances a preparation for death. The first of the Maréchale's cadets to win the martyr's crown was Louis Jeanmonod.

He was a Swiss youth, finely built, nearly six foot, and twenty-one years of age; a true soldier, devoted, courageous, tender-hearted. His months of training were almost over, and in the last three weeks he developed wonderfully. He visited the cafés with great success, singing and speaking, holding his auditors in breathless silence. He had great power in convicting people, and often his opponents would become his friends and ask him to continue to speak to them.

On a January night in 1885 he was guarding the door of the Hall at the Quai de Valmey, when one of the roughs ran at him head foremost and butted him violently in the stomach. Louis managed to shut the door, and next day went on bravely with his work, even selling the En Avant in the evening, till the pain became very severe. The doctor found that a quantity of blood had already settled in his lungs, and soon after pronounced his case beyond all human skill.

Louis was for a time delirious, but he had never in his past life played the fool, and he uttered no word that his mother would not have wished to hear. He always seemed to be starting on a campaign. Were the caps, the bags, and everything else ready? Oh! what glorious times were coming!

When the delirium passed, and his mind became calm, his pallid face shone with a strange light. As soon as the Maréchale came to his bedside, he saluted and said—

"Amen, Maréchale, amen!"

What were his thoughts of the ruffian who had dealt the deadly blow? He had only a single thought—"One day he will be saved." Detectives came to receive the dying man's description of the assailant. A message from them to this effect was conveyed to Louis, who answered it in a single word:

"Jamais!" (Never!)

But he described the guilty man to the Maréchale, that she might know him and pray for him.

Seeking her hand when the end drew near, he said—

"Oh, I love so much to hold your fingers."

"Jesus will take your hands, Louis, and guide you into the port."

"I will—let myself—be guided—by Him."

The Maréchale prayed, and with the spirit of Saint Stephen in his breast and the words "It is too beautiful!" on his lips, he went to be with Christ. Belleville and the Villette were stirred to the depths by a martyr's funeral, and at the grave Théodore Monod spoke words which moved the hearts of all.

The young Maréchale who gathered round her men and women of this stamp—a willing people in the day of the Lord's power, ready for everything, faithful unto death—evidently possessed high qualities of leadership, and ere long the spirit of the École Militaire was to be found in every station of the Army throughout France and Switzerland. Speaking at one of the General's great meetings in Scotland, Professor Henry Drummond said that after travelling all over the South of Europe, visiting many cathedrals and hearing famous orators, he had landed at Marseilles, and felt more of the presence and power of Christ in the Salvation Army meeting-place of that town than he had experienced in all his wanderings. The General repeated this to the Maréchale, and she found that the meeting which had so profoundly impressed the Professor had been conducted by a young officer, Mlle. Dormois, who had recently left the Training School in Paris.

That the authorities at home praised God for the Maréchale's work scarcely needs saying. Her father's appreciation found expression in every letter. Here are brief extracts from three of them.

"My dear girl, my very precious girl, I know you are after my own heart. I place boundless confidence in your judgment and resolutions. Do not be afraid of anything or any one."

"You are a true heroine, a Joan of Arc, indeed."

"You must have a fearful strain upon you. Still a great part of your business is to keep yourself quiet and free from wearing care. To be cool and steady under fire is the quality of the very best soldiers. I fear I have not excelled in this direction, and it is a very difficult property in our family, seeing how full of sympathy and feeling our hearts and lives are, but God can do much for us."

Every letter from her eldest brother Bramwell, who was the Chief of Staff, was a "Well done!" from over the sea. Writing in 1885—the year of his and Stead's heroic crusade against vice—he said: "I get more and more dissatisfied with things human every day. The world is all gone mad. If it was only bad, and not mad, we could mend it, but being both I get less and less hope instead of more! We will now attend to quality more. If we could get better people surely we should go faster. I solemnly believe you are ahead of us on the Continent in this direction."

In the following year he wrote: "Do not think you will ever be less dear to me than you have been. You cannot be. I love and admire you, and if you were my general to-morrow I should follow you to the last gasp and stick while there was one limb of me left."

CHAPTER VII

WOMAN'S VOCATION

"There can be neither Jew nor Greek; there can be neither bond nor free; there can be no male and female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." After the lapse of many centuries this great apostolic saying is beginning to yield up its meaning and its blessing. The Mother of the Army was one of the first to assert woman's liberty, and her daughters entered into a sacred heritage. Having become a public speaker at fourteen, and seen the work of faith rewarded with countless signs following, the Maréchale could never harbour any secret fear that her ministry might be grieving the Spirit of God. It was impossible, however, that she should work for years without encountering many who had strong prejudices. Our Lord's disciples "marvelled that He spake with a woman," and there are still disciples who marvel when a woman speaks for Him.

In the summer of her third year in France, the Maréchale attacked the old city of Nîmes, in the largely Protestant Gard—the first of a series of campaigns which were the means of bringing a blessing to a number of the provinces of France. On her arrival she found that M. Peyron, an eminent judge, who had greatly benefited from hearing her before, had arranged a preliminary meeting of the orthodox of Nîmes—pastors and their wives and other Protestant workers—to the number of about 120. He was anxious that they should be won before her campaign began, but he had no idea that he had prepared for her one of the battles royal of her life.

The meeting being thrown open, the doctrine of holiness—God's power to keep His children from sinning—first came up, and was violently attacked by several pastors who confounded it with perfectionism. Their remarks were loudly applauded, and one lady screamed above the rest—

"Let him that is without sin get up and testify."

Greatly daring, the Maréchale whispered to a comrade who sat beside her, "Rise, Bisson," which he did, and in a few simple words testified, not indeed to his own perfection, but to God's power to sanctify and keep as well as justify.

After a momentary lull, the storm became fiercer than ever, and the ministry of women was now the cause of war. The Maréchale alluded to her mother's manifesto on the subject.

"We have read it," said a lady, "and we do not agree with it. Women are meant for the home. They are commanded to be silent in the churches."

"Besides," cried another, "you are not old enough."

The Maréchale quoted the words, "Let no man despise thy youth."

"But that," retorted a pastor's wife, "was said to a man."

Thereupon the babel of voices became deafening.

"Pretty and prepossessing girls," a matron was heard to say, "should not show themselves in public."

"If you do speak," said a pastor, skilled in distinctions, "you should speak to women only, and not before men."

All through the storm the central figure was quiet and self-possessed. But she was thinking hard. The idea of a distinction in sex had never come before her as a speaker; it was new and strange to her. When she at length spoke again, she put the result of her thinking into a simple, memorable, unanswerable dictum:

"But there is no sex in soul."

Perhaps somebody had said the same thing before, but it was none the less original on her part. Then she expanded the truth:

"The needs of a man's soul are the same as a woman's, and vice versa. You do not get up and say there are so many men and so many women in a meeting. They all need salvation, pardon, purity, peace; all the gifts and graces of the Spirit are for men and women alike. Of course," she continued, "if any woman is so light and frivolous that she makes such a distinction, that certainly proves that she has no vocation to be an evangelist, and I should send her home by the next train."

She felt that the atmosphere of the room was horrible. Religious controversies, like religious wars, create a more frightful spirit than any other quarrels. Instead of prolonging the discussion, the Maréchale sank on her knees and began to pray. She had won by prayer many victories which were remembered after long years. When she was a child of fourteen, she attended a meeting of her mother's at Ryde in the Isle of Wight. She sat far back beside the door, listening till the address was ended, and then she heard her mother ask if some brother or sister would pray. As nobody responded, and the silence became too oppressive to bear, Katie rose and poured out her heart to God in tones of passionate earnestness, seeking for a victory ere the meeting ended. When she got home, she was folded in her mother's arms and covered with kisses; and forty years after, when she was herself conducting a mission at Ryde, a saintly lady of ninety-two told her that no prayer lived in her memory like that child's prayer.

It was such a prayer—long, intense, passionate—that the Maréchale prayed among the orthodox of Nîmes. That night the eldest daughter of M. Peyron, a beautiful, worldly girl, was won for Christ. At seven o'clock on the following morning two pastors, MM. Challand and Babut, along with M. Peyron, awoke the Maréchale. They had come to say, for themselves and others, how they deplored the scene of the preceding night, and to beg forgiveness.

On Sunday morning the campaign proper was begun in the Alcasar, which was packed, and the wives of several pastors were among those who came in tears to the penitent form. Albin Peyron, junior, who is to-day the leader of the Army in Switzerland, began the new life at a "Night with Jesus" which was held after that meeting. In his youth he was the founder of La Petite Armée, which did much good work among the children of Nîmes and other towns of Southern France.

While the Maréchale was always at home in crowds, she loved quiet interviews with individuals if possible still more. In many of these talks the subject was the victory of faith. During one of her tournées, she was conducting meetings in a theatre at Cannes. On a lovely September evening she was walking towards the sea, lost in admiration of the sunset. Fatigued with her Sunday morning's work, she was seeking a little repose. She observed a priest slowly proceeding towards the hill on which stood a little Catholic church. His appearance struck her; he looked at once so distinguished and so sad. An inner voice said to her, "Speak to that priest." "I cannot," she said, "he would think me mad." But the voice said the same words a second time, and then she instantly obeyed. Hurrying towards the priest, she said—

"Good-evening, mon père. I presume you are going to the church on the hill. May I accompany you, for I would speak with you on spiritual subjects?"

Uncovering his head, and bowing with great respect, he answered, "Certainly, madame."

They walked on for a little in silence. Then she said—

"What must I do to be saved, my father?"

"Keep the ten commandments," he answered at once.

"But the rich young man who came to Jesus could say with his hand on his heart that he had kept them all, and yet had no assurance of salvation. He was in great trouble. He said, 'What must I do to be saved?'"

"Oh, then you must take the holy Eucharist very often."

"But those who take it, my father, are they saved from sinning? Are they not the victims of the power of evil, the same as others?"

"Oh! yes, madame, but then there is the Confessional."

"But does not the same thing apply to the Confessional, my father? You must know that there are tens of thousands in France who confess, but fall again the next day. They have not found rest. Is not Christ ready to save us if we are ready to be saved?"

"Alas! madame, we shall sin always, always, to the very end of our lives."

"But, my father, were not St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, Fénelon and many others, delivered from the slavery of sin and self? They attained to something definite—to holiness."

He turned with vehemence and said, raising his voice—

"Ah! madame, but those were extraordinary lives. Those people were saints."

"No, my father, they were men and women like you and me. What God did for St. Augustine or St. Catherine of Siena, can He not do it for me if I am ready to fulfil the conditions which He lays down? What does religion do, what is it worth, if it cannot deliver us from sin?"

He did not answer. He was silently thinking.

She went on, "Is Christ a Saviour, yes or no?"

"Oh, yes, yes, yes, He is!"

"Has He saved you, my father?"

They stood still for a moment, and he turned his face away, with a look of poignant sadness. Then followed a confession—one of the deepest, most heartfelt cries she had ever listened to—ending with the words, "Alas, alas! all the days of my life I sin, and I expect to sin to my latest breath."

The Maréchale was profoundly moved, and felt that she stood upon holy ground. At last she spoke—

"Then Calvary is the greatest fiasco the world has ever seen."

Stretching out his hand, he said, "Oh, madame, do not say that; it is blasphemy."

"But, my father, we are in the presence of facts, not fancies. You have left what men prize most. You have lived up to your light. And what do I find? Torment instead of rest, conflict instead of assurance, bondage instead of deliverance. Surely, my father, Jesus did not come to increase our burdens, but to relieve them. You remember His word, 'Come unto me and I will give you rest.' He said, 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.' Are these theories to be preached in pulpits, or are they realities?"

By this time they stood on the summit of the hill, and she said—

"You are going to preach to-night, mon père?"

"Yes."

"Would you like that we should go down the hill together and resume our conversation?"

"It would be a great pleasure, madame."

He preached one of the best sermons she had ever heard, partly inspired, she could not help thinking, by their intimate talk. As the congregation moved out, she stepped into a Confessional box to wait for him. She saw him turning this way and that with a look of disappointment, and, stepping out, said to him—

"I am here, mon père."

They began to descend the hill together. "My father," she said, "I greatly enjoyed your sermon. But how can you show others the way of deliverance if you have not found it yourself? How can you unbind if you are not unbound? How can you heal if you are not healed? How, my father? Do you not see that all this is only from the head, not from the life, the heart?"

"It is true! But I try, oh, my God, I try!"

"But it does not come in that way—by our struggles."

"Then how?" he exclaimed in a tone of despair.

"Does He not say, 'Abide in me, and ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you'? Does not St. Paul testify, 'I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.' How many have given praise to Him who is 'able to save to the uttermost' and 'able to present us faultless'! Put Him to the proof. If any one has the right to salvation, surely you have."

They paused under a tree in the stillness of evening, and, while he stood with bowed head, she knelt beside him and prayed.

CHAPTER VIII

THE RENUNCIATION OF HOME

Early in 1887 the Maréchale became the wife of Mr. Arthur Sydney Clibborn, an Irish gentleman of Quaker extraction, lineally descended from Barclay of Ury, the hero of one of Whittier's finest poems. Brought up in Bessbrook, which was called the model town from the fact that there was no public-house, police barracks or pawnshop in it, he renounced excellent business prospects in answer to a call which first came to him through a simple, earnest Quaker minister, "Sydney, will thee not come with us?" The visit of some representatives of Salvationism to Bessbrook turned the current of his thoughts in a new direction, making him exclaim, "Here is primitive Quakerism, primitive Wesleyanism, primitive Christianity!" As he had spent some years at school in Switzerland, and become proficient in French and German, he was sent by General Booth to assist the Maréchale in France, and acted as her chief of staff until their marriage.

He was a man of great courage, and received a medal from the French President for saving life from drowning. As a servant of God he would, one cannot but think, have made a splendid Huguenot or Covenanter. His heroic ideal was the persecuted Quaker whose blood he had in his veins. In the Salvation Army's early days of conflict he was the bravest of the brave. He was stoned and covered with mud in the streets of Geneva. He was pursued by a Parisian mob that howled "Down with Jesus Christ!" His life was attempted many times, and he was condemned to death by the Nihilists under the seal of the Paris headquarters; but he never went out of his way to avoid death or use carnal weapons.

Mr. Booth-Clibborn has been specially used of God in removing the difficulties of those troubled with intellectual doubt and in opening the eyes of a large number who were in spiritual darkness.

The Maréchale was now obliged to leave the Training Home, where her vie apostolique among her beloved officers and cadets, whose every conflict and danger she shared, had often seemed to her like life in an earthly paradise. But whatever new duties and cares came to her in her little home in the Rue d'Allemagne, she never allowed them to interfere with her vocation. In the course of fourteen years God gave her five sons and five daughters, among whom life was infinitely sweet to her, yet all her public activities were maintained, while her passion for souls burned with a clear and steady flame.

Loyalty to Christ now assumed a new aspect, and the conditions of discipleship an added stringency. A great sentence in the Gospel—"Verily I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the Gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses and brethren and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the world to come eternal life"—burned itself into the Maréchale's soul, and she never doubted that she received her centuple just because she paid the price.

When she went to any of the towns of France to undertake a difficult campaign, it was impossible for her to do her duty unless she fixed her whole mind and heart upon the work. Having to deal with the mass of sin concentrated in a large mixed audience such as she had to face in these towns, and knowing, as she used to say, that every person had a skeleton in the cupboard, she felt that she must become, as it were, the scapegoat to bear the sins of these people. There was a sense in which she had to be like Christ in this respect, and so co-operate and suffer with Him (Col. i. 24). She must go and set herself apart to lift up hands to God in favour of the city. She must say to every preoccupation, every earthly tie, "Stand thou there while I go yonder to pray." She must live for that town and that people for six weeks, or two or three months. She might do a certain kind of work without giving her life, but it would not be of the apostolic kind. To get the hundredfold of which Christ spoke she must leave father and mother, home and child. In some very real way she must sacrifice and suffer. She had felt this from her childhood, and she now saw it more clearly than ever; there was always a price to pay. The secret of success in such cases was the consciousness of a vocation and a passionate love too, and the personal dealing with the Christ of Calvary.

THE MARÉCHALE
(From a photograph by Fred. Boissonnas, Paris, circa 1880)

How hard it became for the Maréchale to accept this cross may be indicated by a touching scene depicted by her secretary, Miss Gugelman, who is now one of the bravest soldiers of salvation in India.

"'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.' How clearly this was illustrated when, at a late hour one evening, just at the close of her month's meetings in Paris, the Maréchale bent over her little ones' cots to bid them good-bye before starting on her three-months' tour through France and Switzerland. Evangeline, the eldest, had kept awake, for she knew that her mamma was going away. The little arms were flung round the warrior-mother's neck, when, raising her sweet tear-stained face, little Evangeline stammered, 'Maman, stay with me, or take me with you on your tournées.' Our leader's all too human tears filled her eyes; she kissed the little pleader, and then wrapped her up in a blanket, and brought her into the study to see us off. It was painfully clear to us who were watching her, that the leaving of her little ones for the war's sake was a heavy cross to the Maréchale. Thank God, she shirks it not. Suppressing her feelings, she went out into the cold and damp, and started her long all-night journey."

That was in February 1894, and later in the same year she had two of the finest campaigns of her life—at Havre and Rouen. The turbulent beginning at Havre was graphically described by her friend the Princess Malzoff, who accompanied the Maréchale in order to have a taste of the vie apostolique. "There was a great tumult in the 'Lyre Havraise.' The Maréchale had come to publish the word of love and salvation. An immense crowd forced itself into the hall, and who would have dared believe that they had all come simply to present the world with the most scandalous, the most vulgar and odious spectacle that one can imagine? When the Maréchale rose with great dignity and calm ... she could not make herself heard. Every word was interrupted; one could see that it was a prepared stroke. One might imagine oneself to be in an asylum. But she did not let herself be discouraged; she persevered; she walked straight into the midst of the infuriated crowd. She did not tame these wild beasts, but she came out victorious all the same. Tall, beautiful, calm, sustained by her divine conviction and with the strength of a great heart, she came back again and again—our admirable Maréchale! ... In the midst of this infernal and ridiculous tumult a few élite souls felt a noble enthusiasm for this young woman who battled alone against a hostile and wicked crowd. They came to grasp her hand, to express their admiration for her and their shame for those who had broken the simplest laws of hospitality, politeness and civilisation. Blessed be our Maréchale; in her the whole Armée du Salut was personified that night in its strength, its faith, its persevering love."

Tributes to "the Maréchale under fire" were extorted from all the reporters. After two or three meetings the atmosphere was changing and the tide of battle turning, when tidings came from Paris, that Augustine, the Maréchale's little son of two summers, was alarmingly ill. Then came an indescribable mental conflict, which ended in her deciding to remain at least another night and hope for better news in the morning. She called her officers for prayer, and that night spoke with a power and tenderness which held the vast audience as with a spell; after which she had Havre for six weeks in the hollow of her hand.

Next morning she received a reassuring wire from home, and, sitting alone on the beach, she wrote a hymn that gives perfect expression to the thought of the Greater Love—a hymn that has endeared itself in France as much to Catholics as to Protestants. It begins:

Qui quitte famille et terre

Pour mon Nom, pour suivre mes pas;

Qui quitte enfants, père ou mère,

Reçoit le centuple ici-bas.

 

When this hymn was sung in the "Lyre Havraise" a night or two afterwards by one of the Maréchale's young comrades, Mme. Jeanmonod, who had a beautiful soprano voice, it was received with a burst of sympathetic applause, and had to be sung over and over again, till the audience knew it.

Then there was a great harvest of souls to reap. A letter written at the time gives an idea of the intensity of spirit with which the leader threw herself into the work.

"Meeting superb! Nothing of its kind since the days of Geneva and Nîmes, and even better in a sense than that, as the infidels rush to hear me. Perfect order and people pleading to get in. In these first audiences it has been too risky and excitable to allow any to speak but me. They applaud everything, that is, when I have finished speaking, and I never felt more free and regardless of man's opinion. I am stronger with the rough element alone in my weakness, so much stronger as I throw myself on them. Yes, I am filled with the life and power of God for this town. This hour may never come again. My soul is on the full stretch.... Do you know what the 'Centuple' is for me? That my children shall become apostles! Oh, I claim that of God, and do you know there is an assurance in my heart."

In addition to the nightly crowds at the Casino, the Maréchale held afternoon meetings for women only, at which she spoke on such subjects as "The Role of Woman," "The Mother of Jesus," "The White Robe." Nothing impressed Havre more than the midnight suppers she gave to the filles perdues of the town, not a few of whom were constrained to abandon the life of sin. And so generous were the rich citizens in their offerings that at the close of the campaign the Maréchale was at length able to realise one of her cherished ideas—the foundation of a Rescue Home in Paris.

After Havre, the Maréchale had a short breathing-space at home, and then Rouen had to be faced. Again the shadow of the Cross fell upon little hearts and lives. Victoire, who was nearly five, pleaded with upstretched arms, "Don't go, mother! stay with us!" (Ne pars pas, Maman! Reste avec nous!) Evangeline, who had just turned six, had learned the lesson of separation, and, throwing her arms around her mother, said, "Maman, if you do go to Rouen, will some souls be saved that would not be saved if you did not go?"

"Yes; most likely so."

"Then go, Maman!"

And Maman went.

While the good Catholic of Rouen was shocked, the man in the street was amused, at the idea of worshipping God in the Théâtre Français instead of the stately cathedral, and between them they contrived to make the thing impossible. What, they asked, could be more grotesque than preaching and singing hymns on the stage? At the opening meeting the Maréchale herself obtained a fairly good hearing, but a hostile element was present which every now and then convulsed the audience with laughter by some comical exclamation; and when one of her comrades attempted to close the meeting with prayer, the rout was complete. Prayer in a theatre was the limit, and next day the Maréchale was informed by the Mayor that he must pacify the public by terminating these proceedings.

The great Casino, at the corner of the square in which Joan of Arc was burned, was then secured, and the Maréchale began to deliver a series of addresses on "The Holy Mother of Jesus," "Nineteenth Century Miracles," "Confession," "Restitution," "The Saints," "The Pater Noster," "My Credo," "The Altar." The crowds that filled the hall to overflowing were amazed to find that these subjects were all dealt with quite unecclesiastically, and with such an exclusive application to the individual heart and life that sacerdotalism became, as it were, non-existent, while the sinner and the Saviour were made manifest and left face to face. The people who came with minds alert left with hearts melted and consciences aroused. Soon there were great numbers of souls seeking spiritual help, and the Maréchale announced that she would meet the convicted and anxious in one of the rooms of the Casino. No fewer than four hundred sought private interviews in that place, which thus became a confessional of the simple, primitive order. Not by priestly absolution, but through personal contact with the one High Priest and Mediator, was sin remitted and salvation won.

So many Catholics were converted that the head of one of the seminaries thought it necessary to preach against the Armée du Salut. An influential abbé, on the other hand, said: "I cannot, of course, agree with the Salvationists, but I am absolutely convinced of their sincerity, and I am certain they are far nearer salvation than the majority of Catholics." The curé of the largest paroisse attended one day in his soutane, gave an offering for the mission, and bought the publications at the door. When the Maréchale was about to speak to women alone on the Holy Mother, two priests expressed their desire to be present, and she had them concealed behind a curtain. At the end they were deeply moved, and assured her they had not heard a single word with which they were not in heartiest agreement. Such was the deep spiritual impression made upon the town that a newspaper was published containing nothing but accounts of her meetings and the work going on in the Casino.

During all her years in France the Maréchale never posed as a Protestant and never attacked Catholicism. Creeds, ceremonies, penances, pilgrimages—these things were to her neither here nor there. She always went for the real, and she found in Christ not only true divinity but perfect humanity. Her sermon on the Virgin melted thousands of Catholic hearts, and her fundamental doctrine of sacrifice never failed to evoke a response from the Latin races. She was an eager student—so far as the "apostolic life" permitted—of the writings of Catherine of Siena, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon and Fénelon, claiming kinship with all who loved the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth.

Thus she had great power over Catholics as well as Protestants and infidels. One of her most devoted officers, M. le Roux, had, after a brilliant career as a Catholic student, completed his preparation for the priesthood and received the tonsure, when he came under her influence and found his life completely changed. And the following letter received from a lady-professor in Rouen indicates the kind of impression which was made on many Catholic minds.

"Dear Maréchale, I wish to do what I have not yet dared to do when face to face with you—that is, to express the pleasure which I have found in your charming Conférences. They have moved and troubled me to such an extent, have thrown such light in my heart and mind, that I ask myself what is going on within me. Your addresses, so simple and yet so high, so suited to your hearers, so consecutive, have influenced me more than all the beautiful sermons of the monks. You have made me understand that God asks something else from us than outward practices and empty ceremonial, and I feel that you have renewed a faith in me that had nearly disappeared. You have made me taste, thanks to your deep convictions and the warmth of your speech, one of the purest joys I have ever known.... Be blessed a thousand times, Maréchale, for having revealed my religion to be under a new light, for having shaken this apathy which rendered me incapable of every generous impulse, for having made me more sensitive to the sufferings of others. Be blessed in your children, who one day I hope will reward you nobly for all your sacrifices. Be blessed in humanity, the great family which you have elected to live for and which is the object of your care."

Does such a revival as this leave solid and lasting results? Let one case out of many be presented as evidence that it does. M. Matter was a distinguished engineer and an officer in the French army. Extracts from two of his letters tell what the Rouen campaign did for him.

"Beloved Maréchale, Three years ago tonight a poor man entered the Casino through what appeared mere chance. He was burdened with sorrow, keenly conscious of his sins, but never dreaming of asking the Armée du Salut—which did not even excite his curiosity—to help him, hardly believing any more in the possibility of salvation for him. God inspired you; the Holy Spirit made your words penetrate even underneath the breastplate of sin which covered my poor heart. Two days after I was born to a new life. From that moment God has strengthened, protected and directed me. I seek to love Him with all my heart, and I treasure a deep and loving gratitude to you."

And six years later: "I have made a pilgrimage at night in the deserted streets to the Casino where God found me and where you were His ambassador."

This gentleman is now well known all over France for his work among criminals and drunkards, and his services have been recognised by the French government. He gets into personal touch with hundreds of convicts in order to speak to them of the love of God, and down in the Ardèche he has a Home for four hundred little waifs, mostly the children of criminals, whom he calls the Maréchale's grandchildren, he himself being her spiritual son.

The last time she visited him in Paris, they were engaged in eager and intimate talk, when he said, "Do you see that ivory pipe? I have engraved on it the day of my conversion at Rouen; but since that time I have never had any inclination to smoke it. And do you see that pile of letters? These are from my boys in prison. Let me read one of them to you." Then he read the words of a convict who spoke of prison walls lighted up with the glory of Christ's presence. And he added, "Do you remember you said to me when I was in despair over my past life, 'These hands, which have done so much evil, will bring blessing and salvation where I can never go.' Your words have literally come true."

CHAPTER IX

THE FRIENDSHIP OF CHRIST

One night a little card was placed on the table d'hôte of the Hôtel Meurice, in the Rue de Rivoli, intimating to the guests that the Maréchale would speak at an informal meeting in the salon after dinner. Among those who came to see and hear her was a little Russian lady with deep and thoughtful hazel eyes. She was the celebrated Princess Nancy (properly Anastasia) Malzoff of the Russian court. One of the Czarinas died in her arms. She was a friend of King Edward VII, and her brilliant wit made her a welcome figure in every court of Europe. She spoke eight languages.

She was now well advanced in life, and thought she had known everybody worth knowing and seen everything worth seeing in the world. But that evening was the beginning of a new life of peace and joy such as she had never dreamed of. From the moment the Maréchale opened her lips, she was fascinated, first by the speaker, and then still more by the message. Next morning she came in her carriage to the Villette. The Maréchale was scarcely well enough to receive her, but she would not take a "No." When she entered the Maréchale's room, she threw herself by the bedside and exclaimed, "Oh! tell me, how did you get to know Him?"

This was the commencement of a seven years' friendship, and during all that time she was never out of reach without writing the Maréchale every second day.

The Princess was a member of the orthodox Greek Church. Her mother had married her off at sixteen, and she had eleven children by the time she was twenty-eight. When she found that her husband had become unfaithful, she dismissed him with an emphatic "C'est fini!" and for more than a quarter of a century she had never seen him.

The Maréchale listened with deep sympathy to the story of her life, and then said, "You must forgive him, if you would be forgiven."

"Never, never!"

"Yes, if you want Christ, forgive him. Never mind what he has done, you must forgive him."

The Princess could not. A struggle went on in her mind for six weeks. She began to come to the meetings at the Rue Auber, but she had no peace. The Maréchale opened the question again.

"Come now, I want you to write and invite him to meet you at your hotel, to dine with him, and to forgive him."

A terrible inner controversy ensued, and the Princess became ill over it. One can scarcely imagine what it all meant to her, and yet thousands have to go through the same.

Calling one day, the Maréchale found her in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

"Princess, how dare you smoke like this?"

"Well, I am surrounded by a thousand devils, blue, black and yellow. You have been neglecting me."

A ceaseless conflict was raging in her breast, and ere they parted that day she wrote a letter and said she would send it.

The Maréchale called again, and found that the letter had not been sent. Then the crisis came.

"Princess, you are lost. If you do not forgive, your heavenly Father will not forgive you."

"I cannot, I cannot."

She was in agony of soul.

"Princess," said the Maréchale, "are you perfect? From the little I know of you I should think you have a very bad temper."

"It is true, it is true."

"Your sins have not been his, but they are sins before God, and have caused suffering to others. If you want God to forgive your bad temper, you must forgive him."

The Maréchale prayed, and bade her look to the Cross and see how Christ forgave. Then she told her again what to do.

"Darling, you are to invite him to your apartments; you are to have a sweet little dinner for him and flowers on the table, and when he comes you are to kiss him."

"But I cannot!"

"Yes, you will; and remember it is no forgiveness unless you kiss him. Forgiveness means kissing. Forgive him, and I know peace will come."

"Very well, I will, I will!"

The Maréchale chanced to be leaving Paris for a time, and said—

"You will send me a wire when you have done it."

The Princess invited her husband. He made a long night journey. She kissed him and forgave him. Next day the Maréchale received a wire which made her dance for joy. It ran: "Tout s'est passé comme vous l'avez dit, et la paix du Christ m'inonde: Malzoff" (All is done as you said, and the peace of Christ floods my soul.)

Her husband died after a few months, and her thankfulness for what she had done was profound.

The last years of her own life were beautiful. In a letter which she wrote to General Booth in regard to her friend's health she said: "I owe a great deal to the Maréchale. She has given me a treasure greater than all the treasures of this world—she has given me a living Christ; she has put Him not near me, but in me, in my soul, and the gratitude I feel for that blessing is great." An article from her pen on the Army's work in Paris contains these words: "The Salle Auber is to me now a holy place. I feel the presence of Christ there—Christ who has personally become a living Saviour to me since the Maréchale brought me to Him and committed me to His Divine arms."

Hundreds of letters, the last of which was written in St. Petersburg on the day before her death, reveal an intensely ardent nature, and prove that the heart which truly loves never grows old. We translate a few extracts.

"I will use all my moral forces to prove to you that our mutual affection has advanced me in the path of holiness which you opened to me the very first moments I heard you speak. God had pity upon me and sent you on my via dolorosa to open to me a new horizon, a new heaven. He carried my heart to you with an intensity of which I did not think myself capable."

"I have found in you two beings equally precious to me—the first is a friend I love like a dearly beloved daughter; the second the Maréchale of my Salvation, whose work, vocation and power I admire—that moral power which you only in the whole world exercise over me. If I had known you earlier, you would have made a saint of me."

"Not any affection in the world, not even my children's, can replace yours for me. What does it matter though everybody loves me if you do not?"

"I know that it is because I have not yet renounced my 'self,' my 'moi,' that your absence makes me suffer, but I cannot help it—it is beyond my power. I know also that the day my 'self' will be chased away—which is doubtful—I shall love no one, for to love one must be a self, one must have one's own heart."

"I doubt if there are any others who bear you such a deep, complete, living, warm and luminous affection. Not that you do not deserve it, but all natures are not alike, and you know the fault of mine. I cannot love by halves."

"'Love wisely,' some one advises. That word 'wise' hurts me. I do not want to be wise in my love for you. I prefer to love madly, and that is what I do, and you feel it, don't you? Wisdom to the devil when it is a question of the heart."

"I cannot believe that He must detach us from everything to attach us to Himself—that would make me very sad. On the contrary I feel that it is only human love, disinterested love, but deep and living, which can make us understand Divine love. It is only through human experience that we can appreciate His great, His mighty, His eternal love for us. All the life of Jesus is filled with that palpable love for His creatures, and that is why He is so near to us. Let me therefore love you without detachment, and the more I love you the more I will love Him."

One of her letters is peculiarly interesting: "I will see the Emperor in these days, and I will seek strength to speak to him. You see, my darling, speaking is not enough, one must in such a case pour out one's soul and feel that a superior force guides one and speaks for one."

It turned out as she hoped. One night she was at the Palace in St. Petersburg. After dinner the Czar came and seated himself beside her. Soon they were deep in intimate conversation. She began telling him what her new-found friend in Paris had done for her. She talked wisely as he listened attentively. At length he said—

"But, Nancy, you have always been good, always right."

"No," she answered; "till now I have never known the Christ. She has made Him real to me, brought Him near to me, and He has become what He never was before—my personal Friend."

CHAPTER X

THE BURNING QUESTION

It was the often expressed wish of Mrs. Josephine Butler that the Maréchale might be able to join her crusade against the infamous White Slave Traffic. In one of her earliest letters to her friend she said: "Dearest Catherine, the wicked party, as you know, have triumphed in the elections in Switzerland, and the Geneva government has passed that evil Law which our friends were trying to stop.... How nice it would be if you and I could stand up together in Geneva, and denounce their wickedness and proclaim the Saviour. I should love to do so." At a later time she wrote of her young friend, "Oh, I sometimes think if she were in the work of our Federation, what a harvest she might bring us in, or rather bring in for God!"

The Maréchale regarded the wish of that saintly and chivalrous woman as involving a kind of sacred trust. Her own heart was early and deeply troubled by the darker aspects of our modern civilisation. When she and her two brave comrades, Florence Soper and Adelaide Cox, took their first flat in Paris, they were shocked to learn that they had as their nearest neighbours—above and beneath, to the right and to the left—families unconsecrated by any marriage tie; and in the course of their ordinary work they found themselves hourly confronted by all the devils of vice. The lurid facts, of which most Christians, happily for their own peace of mind, know little or nothing, were burned into the souls of these noble women, each of whom dedicated herself to a battle à outrance against this most appalling form of evil. And have they not faithfully kept their vow? Are there any living Englishwomen who have done so much to protect our innocent children and raise our fallen sisters as these three, who first toiled and suffered and prayed together thirty years ago in the Villette of Paris?

In redeeming her pledge, the Maréchale not only gave midnight suppers to the filles déchues of the great cities in which she conducted her campaigns, not only founded Rescue Homes in Paris, Nîmes, Lyons and Brussels, but endeavoured to make the problem of purity a national question, to be dealt with in a statesmanlike manner by every patriotic citizen.

She frequently addressed great meetings of the men of Paris and other cities on this subject, making irresistible appeals to the heart and conscience. It was astonishing how she carried the most critical audiences along with her, though now and then an indignant hearer would leap to his feet and dash out of the hall or theatre in which her meeting was held.

She steadily refused to believe that nothing could be done for the morale of Frenchmen, and her faith in the innate chivalry of the people was amply justified. The respect with which she was heard was a tribute not only to the personal magnetism of a consecrated life, but to the Christian ideal of chastity. She was often told by journalists that any one else, man or woman, daring to utter half the home truths to which she gave expression would have been hissed out of the town. Explain it as one will, when she pleaded the sacred cause of womanhood, men applauded to their own hurt. "Gentlemen," she would exclaim, "I am not French, but I love your nation. I have made your country mine, and I realise what France might be but for the worm which gnaws at the root of your national life. It makes me shudder to think—it makes me literally sick to see—how many thousands of my sisters, and your sisters, in your beautiful city are ministers of vice. So many, your policemen tell me, under twenty, so many under seventeen, so many under fifteen, and there are even those known to the police who are not in their teens. Gentlemen, they do not sin alone, for we are all solidaires. They are like your own girls, your wives, your sweet little daughters. They have hearts, they have brains, they are intelligent, they would make beautiful mothers, our comrades in life's journey, helping us and sharing our burdens. And, alas, what have you made of them? Any nation which can look at that going on in its cities day by day and night by night, without a word, without a protest—which can see this splendid asset, woman, who should bear its sons and daughters, sacrificed and sold to vice, disease, and early death,—that nation is on the decline. Do not tell me that a man worthy of the name can be silent in face of these stupendous facts. Such a man is not a Frenchman.

"I am told that things have always been so, and will always be so. I hear it said on every hand that this vice is a necessity. That some women—that the daughters of the poor—should be sacrificed is regarded as inevitable. Well, then, gentlemen, as you say it is for the public utility, follow your reasoning to its own logical conclusion, be just to these poor creatures; do not despise them, do not call them lost, fallen, prostitutes; be honest and acknowledge them; allow them to stand at least on the same level as our soldiers who sacrifice themselves for their country. Far from being ashamed of them, honour them for their service to our sons and our nation.

"But you say 'it is only une fille,' and one of your senators has publicly said that 'we are come to a fine pass if an honest man cannot buy himself une bonne fortune.' Only a fille! Your mothers were once only filles, your wives were only filles, and what are your own daughters? Wherein lies the difference?

"An honest man! I am not a nun; I am not a man-hater stalking through the world. I revere man. He is half a god. Look at his works in every domain—the king of creation, given that wonderful command to subdue and rule, having everything under his feet. When he rises to his destiny, and becomes a co-worker with God, and puts his life and example—that wonderful miracle called influence—on the side of righteousness, he rises to the sublime. The sum of happiness, of pure joy and peace, that one good man can bring to the little group at home, and then to the community, to the city, to the world, cannot be estimated. And the sum of misery, the curse, the blight that one man can bring to a woman, to children, to every one he touches—that, too, cannot be estimated. An honest man! He does not even stop where the cows and horses do. He goes a thousand miles beneath them! And yet the indulgence of the passions is no more a necessity than the drinking of alcohol is a necessity for an infant of a year old. It is society that awakens those evil desires, and they unfold themselves under the influence of a baneful education.

"Gentlemen, you say that a bad woman is worse than a bad man. Have you ever reflected that the wrongs done to her are far deeper? Have you realised that her make-up is a thousand times more delicate and complex than yours, and that as a consequence this sin makes shorter work of her? Her despair is blacker and she is reckless. You take from her the hope of ever having a little home of her own, of ever having a real husband, of ever hearing herself called mother. You have done that before she can realise what you have done. She does not wait, does not estimate. The realisation comes to her later on in life. And when it comes, is it any wonder that she flies to drink and becomes a demon? Would not I? Would not you?

"Say all that you please against woman. Reckon up the sins on your side and on hers. Still your page is black as ink compared with hers. Think of the generous, the absolute, the totally blind ways she loves.

'Woman's heart runs down to love

As rivers run to seas.'

 

"You have your life, your work, your amusements; but love is her whole existence. She is created in that way. That makes your sin in deceiving a trusting heart infinitely greater.

"You may go and have a good marriage afterwards, and be proud of your charming wife's sweet looks, but does not the vision of another, a pale face sometimes flit across your mind? And when you look at your little cot, do you not see another baby face—another little life you have never owned, of which you are the author, and which is equally yours before God? A woman's heart has been broken, and there will be retribution."

While the Maréchale stood alone, pleading as a woman the cause of woman, her audiences of educated Frenchmen were sometimes so deeply stirred and convicted that they would rock and sob under the power of emotion; and when they rose at the end to sing a hymn that she wrote as a young girl—a hymn which has been translated into many languages—

Ote tous mes péchés!

Ote tous mes péchés!

Agneau de Dieu, je viens à toi,

Ote tous mes péchés,

the words and music would sweep over the audience like a wave, sending many away with consciences tortured and faces bathed in tears.

One morning, after such a meeting, there was a ring at the Maréchale's door, and a lady was ushered into her presence. Coming forward without a word, she took the Maréchale's face between her hands, and warmly embraced her in the French fashion by kissing both her cheeks. The Maréchale inquired what was the meaning of this sweet affection.

"Oh!" said the stranger, "you have restored to me my husband. He was listening to you last night, and when he came home he fell at my feet and begged me to pardon him, vowing that he would never again be untrue to me."

That was but one of the many fruits of these addresses.

Sometimes the Maréchale would read to élite audiences a letter which a man of high social standing wrote to a charming young girl whom he ought to have made his wife. Having met her at Carnival, he awoke in her heart an adoring love, deceived her with a promise of marriage, put a ring on her finger, and after three years abandoned her and her baby boy. The Maréchale took the letter to an eminent jurist and senator, who confessed that for cold-blooded cruelty he had never seen anything to equal it; but he sorrowfully added—such are the laws of Christian lands—that nothing could be done to right the wrong. The letter ran as follows—

"LITTLE MARIE,

"Once again I must ask pardon for all the harm I have done you. I hope, however, that you will be strong in trouble, stronger than you have been up to the present. This will be a very great consolation to me. I owe many thanks for the resolutions that the good little Marie made yesterday, in spite of her heart and all her feelings. Believe that I shall never forget it, and that it cost me much before deciding to break your ideal—but, as I told you, I prefer to be sincere. As long as my heart was free from other passion I always considered you as the best friend I possessed. If I was not completely happy, it was that living without love was not to live—but you, poor little Marie, you suffered!

"You are worth a hundred times more than I, and precisely on account of that we could not understand each other. You who are so good—too good—permeated with the most delicate sentiments, you could not conquer an ambitious man, for I am very ambitious.

"Whilst you dreamed of a simple, quiet life with me, you must understand that violent passions, riches, and a luxurious life are for me essential. In a word, our ideals are completely different, and it is a divorce of souls which I have accomplished in leaving you. Fate made us meet, and fate separates us. Don't have any ill-feeling towards me. My dream now is to create for myself quite a new life made up of goodness, of love, and above all faithfulness in a serious affection.

"I sacrifice you, it is true, but if it were otherwise, think of the torture you would have inflicted on me. Is it not better to separate, each of us keeping a good memory of what made our union? Think also how my life is insupportable in this muddle now that I love truly.

"You are good, Marie; be courageous now. The sacrifice that I ask of you is enormous, I know, but do it for love of me, and I will be eternally obliged to you.

"You will put all your tenderness in the little Gustave, whom I shall never forget, and above all remember that he who loves well chastises well. Au revoir—au revoir!

"Once again pardon me, and don't suffer too much by your exile. My only hope is that Gustave will recompense you largely for all the suffering you have endured, so little merited during these long years.

"I remain,

"Your devoted——."

Marie was human, and when the marriage day drew near there was a fierce flaming-up of resentment in her young heart. She thought of making a scene at the church and spoiling the bridegroom's joy. Her brother fanned her burning sense of wrong, and promised to back her up if she would seek revenge. But the Maréchale pleaded with her, the love of the Crucified constrained her, and on the morning of the wedding she wrote the following pathetic little note: "He is to be married to-day. The wedding bells are ringing.... It is all over, dear Maréchale, and I am on my knees in my little room. All is well; the peace of Christ is in my heart, and I have the victory." This is no romance, but a bit of real life. Which of us would have done as little Marie did? She did not know it, but she was worthy that morning of the ministry of angels—the shining ones who have never sinned and never suffered.

Sometimes the Maréchale would tell her audience a story to prove what wells of love there still are in the hearts of the most abandoned. During a three months' campaign at Lyons, resulting in one of the most remarkable revivals in which she ever took part, she was giving a midnight supper. Her officers had gone to the most notorious houses and left a card containing the words: "A lady who is devoted to the cause of women desires to speak to them on subjects which deeply interest them, in —— Hall, at twelve to-night. Supper, music and singing."

The city had been moved, and the rich demonstrated their sympathy with this effort. Having had frequent experiences of the risks attending midnight gatherings, the Maréchale enlisted the interest of the police, who on this occasion gave her all possible assistance.

Late in the evening the table was covered with damask cloths and adorned with flowers. A supper of roast beef, vegetables, fruit and black coffee was prepared. Towards midnight the piano began to be played, that those who entered the hall might be welcomed with cheerful music.

Some girls came in laughing, and quickly went out again, evidently thinking there must be some deception. They did not believe that banquets were spread for nothing. Sometimes it was very difficult to convince them that the thing was not a farce.

Presently a horrible old hag appeared—it would be difficult to imagine a more ugly, repulsive woman. Coming up to the Maréchale she said—

"You are the Holy Virgin. I know it. Oui, vous êtes la Sainte Vierge, je le sais."

The Maréchale did not know what to say, so much was she taken aback.

"You are the Holy Virgin," the old woman repeated.

"Come along and have a talk with me," said the Maréchale, "and take supper. I am delighted to see you."

The woman laughed. "No, no, no, it isn't me that you want—Ce n'est pas moi qu'il vous faut."

"Yes, it is you. I am happy, believe me I am so happy, to see you. It is you whom I want. Do sit down."

At last, with great difficulty, she was persuaded to be seated. But she stayed only a minute. The Maréchale turned to speak to somebody, and the old woman darted out of the hall. She was gone like a flash.

"We won't see her again, Maréchale," said one of the officers.

The Maréchale began to blame herself. Why did she not inspire the poor creature with confidence? Why could one not make her feel at rest? Why had she run away? She had seemed to suspect something. It was a sore disappointment.

After some waiting, the girls began to come, and the tables filled up, but every time the door opened the Maréchale turned her eye towards it in the hope of seeing her old woman return. A gloom had been cast over her spirit because that woman had gone out, not believing that she was welcome, thinking she was too old and too ugly.

The beautiful grace, "Nous Te benissons," was sung, prayer was offered, and sweet music filled the air while the plates were handed round. Some of the guests were pretty and some ugly, some young and some old, some clad in rags and some dressed in the height of fashion. Some poor famished creatures asked for a plate of meat four or five times, while others, having already supped, merely touched a little fruit with their dainty fingers and sipped a cup of black coffee.

The supper was nearly ended, and the Maréchale was preparing to speak, when the door burst open, and in came our old woman, with a pretty young girl, fair as a lily, on one arm, and a dark one, equally young and beautiful, on the other. Up she came to the "Holy Virgin," with her dear old face radiant.

"Voilà! I have gone and found them. It's these that you want! For me it is too late, but show them the other side of the medal."

The Maréchale could not speak. Her eyes filled with tears. The words cut her through. The woman did not know what an act she had done, nor what an unforgettable phrase—le revers de la médaille—she had used.

"I have spent a long time in seeking them," she said. "I am pleased—Je suis contente."

"And I, too, am happy," said the Maréchale, "but especially because you have come."

"Moi!! for me it is finished. For me it is too late. But these—they are young, they are pretty, they have life before them. It is these that you want!"

The three sat down, the Maréchale taking the old woman next to her. And she never served a cup of coffee with such pleasure in her life.

In after years she would sometimes tell the story of that old woman on a Sunday morning to an English congregation, and then ask the searching question, "Which of you has ever spent two hours day or night seeking for a lost soul as she did?"

CHAPTER XI

THE PRODIGAL SON

Baron X, the eldest son of the Baron of that name, was born at Bordeaux, and brought up in a family of strict Catholic traditions. He studied at the Collêge de Tivoli and the Lycée, but he cared for little except sport and pleasure. After he had wasted much of his father's substance in riotous living, he was informed that his allowance would be entirely cut off unless he went abroad for a time. Leaving home in disgrace, he sailed for New York, and was beginning to taste the bitterness of exile, when, chancing one day to enter a big restaurant, he was astonished to meet his cousin, the Viscount of X., who, having inherited a fortune of two million francs, was making haste to squander it. Falling upon each other's necks, they at once became companions in pleasure. Giving themselves up to all kinds of insanity, they spent immense sums in a few months.

Baron X was afraid to give himself a single moment of reflection on the enormity of his errors. He was inwardly miserable, and found that everybody else who was pursuing pleasure was as unhappy as himself. One night, at a dance in Montreal, he said to the queen of the ball, admired by everybody for her beauty and charm—

"Would that I could find out how to enjoy myself again!"

She answered, "If I seem to be gay, I have no reason for being so. Oh, how I suffer!"

The young man felt that existence became more and more mechanical, the days succeeding one another in an endless monotony of unsatisfying amusements. He seemed to be living in a bad dream.

After a while he returned to France, and one evening he was sitting, sad at heart, on the balcony of the Café de la Paix, wondering to what place of pleasure he should turn his steps, when some Salvationist girls came to offer their journal to the customers. They were greeted with the usual pleasantries. Baron X asked the waiter if he knew who these people were.

"Oh, yes, Monsieur, they are the Salutistes, and if you want to have a good laugh, you have only to go to the Rue Auber, which is quite near by; they have a hall there where you could spend a good evening."

His curiosity awakened, Baron X went to the place indicated, taking a fille de joie with him. The fair-haired young man and his companion sat at the bottom of the hall laughing. That evening there were "testimonies," which somehow arrested Baron X's attention. He could not help asking himself how these young people seemed so happy. Then a young officer read the words, "The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord," and delivered an address which was not correct in language, but extremely incisive. Baron X said to himself, "He knows my history, and speaks to me." As he went out, he bought some publications which were exposed for sale at the door, and spent the night in reading them. He came next evening alone, and a great spiritual conflict began. He continued to come, and one night remained behind, being in an agony of soul. Sobbing aloud, he confessed that he had led a wild and wicked life, dishonoured his name, and broken his mother's heart. At one o'clock in the morning he gave himself to God.

The Maréchale saw that he was afraid of himself in Paris, and opened her doors to him. For six months he lived partly at her house and partly at the headquarters in the Rue Auber. She soon came to know him through and through, and was struck by his simplicity and absolute sincerity. He had broken completely with the past, and never had one arrière pensée. He was ready for any sacrifice and for the humblest service.

One day a police agent came to tell the Maréchale that she had somebody living in her house and wearing the uniform of the Armée de Salut, who was passing himself off as the son of Baron X. She called Baron X, and, while the two men stared at each other, said, "This is the son of Baron X." The official apologised and withdrew.

Baron X had written to tell his parents of his conversion, but received no answer. After six months the Maréchale had to begin a tournée at Bordeaux, and told Baron X that she would seize the opportunity to go and visit his parents. He was overjoyed. He hoped for much, and said he would pray.

When the Maréchale, clad in uniform, drew near to the gates of the Baron's château, a complete stranger stopped her and exclaimed, "My poor child, what are you going to do in that house?" She only smiled and walked on, but the question came back to her mind afterwards.

Ringing the bell, she was shown into a luxurious room, and presently the Baron, the Baroness, and their daughter appeared. She was received as stiffly as if she had been the representative of the Queen, and found it hard to begin. Making an effort, she said they had probably learned from their son that a wonderful change had taken place in his life. She was happy to be able to confirm it. For six months she and her officers had witnessed his life, and had noticed nothing in word or look or act inconsistent with this marvellous change.

There was no answer. The parents and daughter simply stared at their visitor. She continued—

"I know that his life has been bad, but I thought that you would be glad to hear of his conversion."

Then the Baroness could no longer contain herself. A torrent of words fell from her lips. She depicted the scandalous life of her son, who had been a real prodigal in every sense of the word, gambling away their wealth, bringing his mistress into their house, and disgracing their name.

"But," said the Maréchale, "that was before his change. Do not bring up what he once was. Think of what he is now. He has been living among my children, and I can trust him to go in and out with them. I know something of real conversions, and I think I can judge. I assure you that he has become a new man, with new desires, new aspirations, a new nature."

These assurances only led to another realistic description of his sins.

"But," pleaded the Maréchale, "that was when he was Saul; now he is Paul."

They stared and did not comprehend the meaning of her words.

"Let him come back to the Catholic Church," said the Baron. That his son should profess to have been saved outside the holy Mother Church was evidently a last blow to his pride.

"That is surely a secondary matter," said the Maréchale. "Considering what a sinner he has been, you should not mind by whom the change has come. He has been converted in the Armée du Salut, but there is only one God and one Saviour. Catholic and Protestant are alike if they have no life."

But the Baroness drew herself up in her beautiful robe, and said—

"Let him come back to the Catholic Church, or he will never receive another sou from us."

The Maréchale saw that it was time to end the interview.

"Very well, Baroness," she said, rising, "I will be your son's mother. I will buy your son clothes and boots."

With that she left their house disappointed and weary, having spent hours under their roof pleading their son's cause, but they had never offered her so much as a cup of tea.

On her return to Paris, she called Baron X. His face fell when she began to speak. She bade him be brave, described to him her interview with his people, and ended by saying, "I will be a mother to you, and you shall never lack for anything."

He worked on with her in Paris for some months, and then he received a telegram, "Come quickly, father dying." The Maréchale rushed him off, and he afterwards gave her an account of his eventful journey.

When he got home, he found the house silent, every sound muffled without and within.

"Am I too late?" he asked.

"No, hush! He has been asking for you all the time. Come quickly."

Upstairs he went to his father's room. Entering, he saw two thin white hands on the coverlet, and heard a voice—

"Is it my son?"

"Yes, father!"

With one bound he was at the bed-side, and fell on his knees. With breath coming thick and fast, his father said faintly—

"Oh, my son, your religion is better than mine. Forgive your old father for not forgiving you."

Holding his hand, his son spoke to him of the Saviour, and sang to him some of the choruses he had learned in the Army. Father and son were a thousand miles away from Catholicism and Protestantism. They were simply in the presence of the Saviour. With words of salvation in his ears, and filial arms around him, the old Baron passed away.

Himself now Baron X, he came into his fortune. However bad an eldest son has been, he cannot, by French law, be disinherited.

For the next four years Baron X was an officer in the Armée du Salut. In Paris and Nîmes, England and Belgium he worked with ardour for the salvation of souls. He was with the Maréchale in her Brussels campaign.[1]

[1] Described in chap. xiii.

He married Mlle. Babut, the daughter of the well-known pastor in Nîmes. As a girl she had been brilliantly clever, but very wilful, closing her heart to all who sought to influence her for good. When the Maréchale came to Nîmes she went, like everybody else, to the meetings, taking with her girl friends whom she excited to mock and laugh. But a strange power seized her. In vain she tried to escape by ridiculing what she heard. "One evening," to use her own words, "the Maréchale—directed by God—turned her eyes full on me and said, 'Young woman, you have not the right to waste your life.' Clear, pointed, cutting like a sword, this truth penetrated me, and with it the conviction, 'I ought to yield to God here and now.'" Three months later she was in the Training Home in Paris.

The Baron X and his wife afterwards became missionaries in Madagascar. They gave themselves heart and soul to the work. When Baron X's health began to fail, they returned home, and he continued to labour for Christ as long as he had any strength left. His end came in 1911. Pastor Babut said he had been attending death-beds for fifty years, but had never seen anything so beautiful as the Baron's latter end.

"Courage," said some one to the dying man.

"Courage? I do not need it when heaven is open to me."

"Do you see the Lord Jesus near you?"

"But I am with Him!"

"God has used you to work for Him."

"All I have done counts for nothing, only the immense grace and love of God remain."

CHAPTER XII

SO GREAT FAITH

It was mid-winter, and the ground was covered with snow. There was no little anxiety at the Villette. Forty hungry mouths had to be filled at the École Militaire, and there was nothing for dinner. The simple fact was that the cash-box was empty, and it was difficult not to have a heavy heart. But the maxim of a Salutiste is "Keep believing!" God had never forsaken the Maréchale when she trusted in Him. Depression and melancholy she regarded as lack of faith. She bade her secretary call a fiacre. When they got in, the officer said—

"You have the fare, Maréchale?"

"No!"

"But——-"

"The Lord have mercy upon you! Where is your faith? Get down on your knees and pray!"

The officer instantly obeyed. They both prayed—it was real prayer—and their hearts became lighter.

The fiacre drew up at the gate of a beautiful house in the Champs Elysées. It had to be kept waiting, for there was no money to pay the cocher.

The Maréchale was ushered into a luxurious apartment, and was soon talking with a Russian Countess about her soul. They had never met before, but they found common ground.

"I too," said the Countess, "adore the Christ! Come and see.... Look, the Christ!"

They stood before a beautiful picture of the thorn-crowned Redeemer.

"I adore Him!" she repeated.

"But it is one thing," said the Maréchale, "to adore Him here in these charming surroundings, and another thing to adore Him amidst the filth, the immorality and the misery of the Villette, where I live night and day among the poor and the dying, and where I have devoted young comrades who have left comfortable homes and bright prospects, and are now labouring for Christ and receiving nothing for it. What is your adoring Christ compared with theirs?"

The Countess was silent, and evidently felt bad. She had suddenly received a new ray of light upon the adoration of Jesus, and, realising that deeds are better than words, she left the room for a minute, to return with an offering of 500 francs.

It was by such gifts that the Army was maintained on the Continent. The Maréchale, it is somewhat strange to discover, was not only the apostle but the financier of the Armée du Salut in France. Others, of course, could administer the funds, but on her fell the burden of replenishing the exchequer. As years passed and the work extended, the task became more and more heavy. Officers had to be supported, the rent of houses and halls paid, the Training Home, the Rescue Homes, the Orphanages, the Homes of Rest maintained, and to meet all this outlay the Maréchale toiled, travelled, and wrote countless letters. Those who adored the Christ sent her their gifts from many lands.

While there were many generous supporters of the Army in France and Switzerland, the largest contributions came from the home-country. We have noted that the General did not like to see Catherine's hand-writing, because he thought of her weak spine. Yet in one day she and her secretary would sometimes write over a hundred letters with their own hands, which at the end were too cramped to go on with more. Experience had taught her the value of a personal application. Many a well-wisher who would have given £5 in response to a typewritten letter, did much better on receiving a warm appeal in the leader's own handwriting. She even made it a rule to write receipts herself.

Lean months tested the spirit of the Training Home. Though there was nothing to eat but a plate of cabbage-soup and a potato, the cadets never murmured. "C'est la vie apostolique," they cheerfully said one to another. And it was easy to bear any hardship when their leader shared it with them. One who was an officer with her for years wrote: "In all things she was our example. If you wished to incur her displeasure, you had but to give her something to eat which the workers did not have. As she was in delicate health, sometimes those around her would try to get a little luxury to tempt her appetite or strengthen her. They would be met with the answer: 'Whatever is this? It is not for me, I hope, because, though it is very good of you, I did not want it, and will not have anything of the sort.' Then she would share it all round."

Whenever it became known that the exchequer was almost empty, the officers and cadets knew that this was a call to prayer. On one occasion the rents of the Rue Auber and Quai de Valmy halls were due; there was nothing to meet them; and there were but three days of grace. These were days of agony. All the officers who had anything to spare gave it. The children in the orphanage gave three francs and ten centimes. But when the best had been done, not a tithe of the necessary 3000 francs was in hand.

Everybody met for prayer. The Maréchale spoke on the words, "Though the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines ... the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet will I rejoice in the Lord." She rang the changes on that "rejoice," asking, "Are we there?" Yes, they were all there—anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer with thanksgiving telling God their needs.

At such times the leader of the little band felt that God had to take care of His name, His honour; He had to send what was required. Who will call such a faith in question? Did not the German people say of Luther, "Look, there is the man who gets from God whatever he asks?" When the Maréchale was travelling with her secretary in a third-class carriage in the West of France, the poor people got in with their baskets of vegetables, and one of them said in a loud whisper, "Take care what you say; these people when they pray get from God all they want."

To return. On the morning of the last day of grace the Maréchale received a letter from Scotland containing a draft for £100, a "God bless you," and nothing more. She never knew what kind human heart had been moved to send the letter. But she never doubted that God had sent it.

Such occurrences were not solitary. Here is the testimony of M. Grandjean, who was for years one of the Maréchale's best officers. "I think with gratitude to God of the difficult days in which our faith was severely tested, when I was cashier in Quai de Valmy, and I had not a shilling, and we had to pay the 6000 francs for rents and other expenses. I shall never forget my overwhelming joy when one night I appealed to the cadets who could pray with faith, and when five or six of us prayed with me in the little kitchen of the Quai de Valmy. The next day the Maréchale received by the first post a cheque of 6000 francs from some one who did not know that we were in need."

In one of her tournées the Maréchale was labouring down in the South of France. Though she was in the greatest need and had a heavy heart, she went on with her meetings, when a lady who had been wonderfully blessed, and two of whose children had been saved through her ministry, was moved to give her a thankoffering of 5000 francs. Having to travel all night on the way back to Paris, and finding herself alone among a lot of working-men the Maréchale put the money in her bosom and prayed, "Now keep Thy little one," but did not dare to sleep.

Among the Army's unfailing supporters in France were the Maréchale's personal friends. One of the dearest of these was Madame de Bunsen, née Waddington, who wrote In Three Legations. They first met in Cannes, where the Maréchale was conducting a campaign in the theatre; and a great bundle of letters, partly in French and partly in English, testifies to the warmth of their friendship. Madame de Bunsen once persuaded the Maréchale to rest for some weeks in her castle on the Rhine; and another time she tried to induce her to visit Florence, but the Maréchale could never quite get over the feeling that taking holidays was backsliding.

Another of her constant supporters was Mr. Frank Crossley, that high-souled man of business whose Life has been admirably written by Rendel Harris. Soon after the Maréchale went to France he wrote to express his "ardent sympathy" with her work. "I have," he said, "met and known well several Christian workers—D. L. Moody, Miss Ellice Hopkins, Miss Mittendorff, and others—but I will tell you that perhaps none of these have created the same impression that you have done."

In one of her last letters she wrote "Tell me, how is it that what seems so far off to us is near to you." She was a beautiful soul and found peace in Christ.

he received hundreds of letters from him, and they are very interesting reading. What chiefly attracted him to the Maréchale was her intimacy with Christ, which was the reward, as he saw, of self-sacrifice. His words on this theme go very deep.

"It is a struggle hard and long, but it is only the struggling, who spend their life-blood in the cause, that can claim blood-relationship with the Lord Jesus. The rest are second-cousins or not even as near as that. They don't know Him very intimately or feel much at home with Him when they pay Him a morning call.... He makes the entrance high and the gate strait that it may be prized when gained—I believe that is the key to the mystery of life, or at least to a large part of it. To let us up to the top for the prayer of a moment and the sacrifice of nothing would in many cases at any rate be impossible and useless. Tell me soon more of how to climb. I am a slow learner."

Mr. Crossley's nature had a pensive strain which the Maréchale's friendship helped to modify. Regarding such a matter he felt that "speech should not go near the length of feeling," but ere long we find him writing, "Das hallelujah Vögelein singt in meinem Herzen."

His donations to the work of the Army both at home and in France were very generous. He gave the Maréchale many thousand pounds a year. His liberality was part of his worship of Christ. Nothing could be finer than the following: "I know you will be thinking it is a serious slice off my capital. Well, it is a branch off the tree. 'They broke off branches from the palm trees and strewed them in the way and shouted Hosanna,' and so do I." And again: "You are very grateful to me for what I have been able to give you, but if you knew how indebted and grateful I also felt to you, you would see how God makes us unequal that we may teach ourselves by the aid and necessary services He enables us to render." Mr. Crossley wished the Maréchale to accept a gift of £10,000 for the maintenance of her family, that she might be personally free from financial care, and also offered to build her a home outside Paris, but she declined both these offers, not wishing to be in a different position from the other officers of the Army.

In 1891 the Maréchale went to America to raise funds for the work in France. Accompanied by her secretary, Mme. Peyron—who was her Geneva convert Mlle. Roussel—she sailed in October by the Columbia for New York, and visited twenty-eight of the principal cities of the States and Canada, holding sixty meetings, travelling sometimes for thirty or forty hours at a stretch, and once with the added experience of being snowed up for twelve hours. She was everywhere very cordially received, and all the buildings in which she spoke were densely crowded. Ministers offered her churches in which a woman had never spoken before. After one meeting she received invitations from a Bishop and seventeen pastors to address congregations on her work.

The reporters everywhere found her and her utterances good copy. "She was not able to see representatives of the press in New York, although they came by dozens," as one learns from the Boston man who claimed to be "her first American interviewer." He found that "her life in France has given a Gallic twist to this Englishwoman's tongue. She is quite as French in manner as her staff-captain, Madame Peyron, the dark-eyed Frenchwoman who travels with her."

One morning she got a great reception from the divinity students of Yale, to whom she spoke at length on the qualifications necessary for "saving souls," namely, the possession of a pure heart and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. "When she had finished her address she said she was willing to answer any questions they might have to ask, and for half an hour the students and several of the professors poured a host of questions upon her that would have embarrassed and muddled the clearest-brained ministers of the country under similar circumstances. She, however, showed that she had answered questions before, and gave answers that brought both laughter and applause, for her wit is keenly cultivated."

It is interesting to see her through Yale eyes. "Her face is a study the like of which an artist or a sculptor might seek for years without finding. In repose it reminds one of the pictures of the Madonnas of Michael Angelo, but when she speaks its earnestness is so intense that it is almost stern. Her voice is one that any actress might well covet for its depth and strength. It is the equal of the great Bernhardt's, and yet it is sweet and soft, and has none of the harshness of the masculine tone. Her accent is something charming, for it has all the attractiveness of the English tongue made even more sweet by long familiarity with the French language. From her long acquaintance with the lower classes, the socialists and all free-thinkers of France, she has acquired that fiery directness and ease and attractiveness in her speaking which is so characteristic of French oratory and so fascinating to Americans. It is no injustice to this remarkable woman to say that, had she chosen the stage for her rôle in life, her name would have certainly been as famous in that profession as it is to-day as the Maréchale of the French Salvation Army."

In America she had the immense happiness of being reunited with her brother Ballington, who, being a year older than herself, had been her chum in childhood, and his wife, née Maud Charlesworth, who had been her brave girl-comrade in the first days of persecution in Switzerland.

In the end of January, 1892, the Maréchale returned to France, after an absence of three months and a half. America had given her $60,000 for her work, and memories of unlimited kindness.

CHAPTER XIII

BEAUTY FOR ASHES

"You have added a new word to the French language," said M. Sarcey, the famous critic, to the Maréchale; "I mean the word 'Salutiste.'" In 1881 there was not a single Salvationist in France or Switzerland. After fifteen years there were 220 stations and outposts, over 400 officers, headquarters in five cities, and four weekly papers.

But these bare facts only feebly indicate what the Maréchale did for France. In a moment of depression at the thought of French infidelity, the Princess Malzoff once remarked to her—

"The French have no soul."

"How dare you," asked the Maréchale, "say such a thing?"

Her friend replied with charming inconsistency, "But you have found the soul of France!"

That was perhaps the highest tribute ever paid to her.

If one asks some Frenchman who knew the Maréchale in those days how she won the heart of France, one gets the answer, "But it is natural—she has the French temperament; and, besides, elle aime la France." If one asks some convert of hers how she found the soul of France, the reply is, "Ah! she brought us the Christ, who is victorious everywhere." Both questions were answered together by one who, speaking for many, said, "She bought us at the price of tears and sacrifice."

When she was at the zenith of her power in France, an admirable appreciation of her was written[1] by one of the saints of the modern calendar, Miss Frances E. Willard. We extract a few sentences. "She inherits, it is said, beyond any other of the endowed and consecrated eight children of the General and Mrs. Booth, their special gifts, graces, and grace.... The Maréchale's career already fulfils her father's prophecy that women will, if once left free in their action, develop administrative powers fully equal and oftentimes superior to those of men.... 'I love France,' she said to me, with sparkling eyes: 'it is a great and wonderful country, and I love its people every bit as much as ever I loved my own. I have become familiar with its peasants in the provinces; have sat down with the French women who clatter about in sabots; have shared their chestnuts with them, heard of their sorrows as well as their joys, and, believe me, the human heart is just the same in France as it is everywhere; and if you classify the saints whose histories have come down to us, France would occupy the front rank. The nation that has produced a Lacodaire, a Pascal, a Fénelon, and a Madame Guyon, does not lack the germs of spiritual life.'"

[1] The Review of the Churches, Feb. 1894.

In 1896, however, her career in France came to an end. She received the command to go and devote herself to the work of the Army in Holland, and loyally prepared to obey.

Catholics and Protestants alike were dismayed at the news. One of her dearest friends, the Catholic scholar M. Lassaire, whose exquisite translation of the four Gospels had the honour of being put upon the Index Expurgatorius, came to her and said—

"You ought not to leave us. God has given you the ear of the nation as it is given only once in a hundred years."

"But I am commanded."

"If the angel Gabriel descended from heaven and bade you go, you ought not to leave France!"

Théodore Monod, whose own family had been greatly blessed through the Maréchale, deeply sympathised with her, and grieved over her departure almost as if she had been his own daughter, but tried to comfort her by saying, "You leave us your hymns!"

The day on which the Maréchale left France was one of the two or three dark days of her life. She felt somewhat like the young Scottish Queen who said as she gazed at the receding shores of Calais—

"Adieu! mon charmant pays de France,

Adieu! te quitter c'est mourir."

And yet she believed in her heart that God would work out His gracious purpose, which no circumstances can ever alter.

That she loved France with a deep, pure, passionate love does not need to be said. How France appreciated her in return may be indicated not only by M. Sarcey's emphatic dictum, "The devil take the country where she was born! she is French in her soul," but by any letter taken at random from hundreds which she received from men and women of France.

The following extract, faithfully translated, shows the calibre of the people whom the Maréchale was able to reach, as well as the warm, generous style in which the Latin races habitually express themselves.

"The evening in which you spoke of the scene on Calvary and the words of the penitent thief, 'Remember me,' that simple story, told by a believing soul, had more effect upon me than all the theses, quotations and theological arguments of all the doctors I have ever heard. That expression, that attitude, that conviction, that certitude, that assurance, that living faith which affirmed itself before me in an apostle, a new disciple of Christ, and that melodious voice, completed my transformation. I believed that I was the penitent thief and you the Christ who said to me, 'When I am in Heaven I will remember thee,' and that affirmation transported me....

"I marvel at the courage with which you endure fatigue, mockery, journeys, labours of all kinds to conquer for truth and light the millions of savages who are still in France, plunged in the darkness of error and superstition. Permit me to express once again my sincere admiration, and to offer you in the name of my country (I am perhaps a little presumptuous to speak in the name of France, but I have the right, as much as the other ten millions of citizens)—in the name of my country, and in the name of civilisation, my warm gratitude. Deign to accept the homage ... of a very humble soldier and disciple of Christ."

Swiss love, too, was now deep and strong, as will be sufficiently proved by a single letter, which enclosed a thankoffering.

"Dear Maréchale—(How much that word contains of affection, admiration, and veneration, I cannot express),—These thousand francs fulfil their end where they do the most good and give you the greatest pleasure. You always think of yourself last, if you think of yourself at all; that is why others must think of you. I would have liked to relieve you, dear Maréchale, you particularly and personally. But you are devoured by the zeal of your divine work, and all goes that way. Be it so! God will relieve you directly by His hand. He will, but do not forget yourself entirely, I beg of you. Care for yourself, for the sake of those who love you, and who need your help, and who find so much happiness in your heavenly affection.... In the love of Christ, your devoted, A.S."

In the end of that year the Maréchale needed words of good cheer, and they were not lacking. Her sister Eva was one of her comforters, sending many tender messages across the Atlantic. Just after Christmas Day—Eva's own birthday—she wrote: "I cannot say how much you have been in my thoughts. I wished I could have popped in and had a sister's birthday kiss and a good talk, but the Lord came very near to me, and I was cheered that His birthday found me very busy on mine seeking the poor lost souls of men. The years pass, but then what matters? Every day brings us nearer our Eternal home, does it not, and then we will live and love together for ever and ever, all of us. Dear, darling Katie, I don't like to hear you say the year has been a sad one. You are treasured by us all, by God and the world, and how much you have done for the Kingdom as well.... There are some fond memories I treasure which have to do with you and me, when I made you laugh and gave you baked potatoes! I will write again soon. Till then and for ever after always the same, Eva."

Commissioners E.D. and Lucy Booth-Hellberg—the General's youngest daughter—who took over the command of the Army in France and Switzerland, wrote in their first Annual Report (1896): "One of the last links in the long chain of desperate efforts for the salvation of France, put forth with undiminished love and faith by the Maréchale, was the Lyons campaign, which lasted for six weeks during the months of January and February. Supported by a number of believing and hard-working officers, she conducted a series of truly remarkable meetings in the Salle Philharmonique, which was filled on every occasion with an attentive and largely sympathetic audience. The results of the campaign were most encouraging and of a decidedly permanent nature. The local corps, which up till then had led a very struggling existence, received a powerful lift and is now in a healthy condition. Furthermore a considerable amount of prejudice against our work was removed and a number of friends and sympathisers were made, the immediate result of which was the establishment of a Rescue Home for women in that city." Later on Lucy wrote to the Maréchale, "Darling, your love for France is wonderful; you cannot understand it."

Had the Maréchale been sent to another of the Latin races—for example, the Italians or the Spaniards—her gifts might still have been used to the highest advantage. She once conducted a brief campaign in a great hall at Turin. At the beginning she encountered a storm of opposition. While she dedicated the child of one of her former officers, her voice was drowned in an uproar which turned the solemn service into a fiasco. The audience got completely out of hand, and, as a final stroke of devilry, a troop of students, headed by a big fellow with an evil, cynical face, came marching up the aisle, shouting, yelling and brandishing sticks. The ringleader had made a bet that he would kiss the Maréchale. Her officers began to think it was high time to close the meeting. But she was not near the end of her resources. Giving her familiar order, "Leave them to me, and pray!" she stepped to the edge of the platform, and, when the leader was within a foot of her, fixed her eyes on his face, raised her finger, and sang—[2]

Si tu savais comme Il t'aime,

Sans tarder tu viendrais à Lui,

Tu viendrais à l'heure même,

Tu viendrais dès aujourd'hui.

[2] This hymn was composed by one of her officers, M. Grandjean. The tune was one of the sweetest operatic airs of the day.

The clear, sweet notes went vibrating through the great hall, and Italy knows the power of song. The ringleader stood staring as if he had been petrified, and his followers did not advance another step. While the Maréchale sang on, she was heard in breathless silence. Then she spoke for an hour. The after-meeting lasted till midnight, and the leader of the students, completely broken down and sobbing like a child, said, "Oh, stay with us, you will make angels of us all!"

In Holland, where the Maréchale laboured six years, she was heavily handicapped by the fact that most of her speaking had to be done through an interpreter. She had not that Open Sesame to the heart of a people—the mastery of its language. She learned, however, to sing beautifully in Dutch, and the translation of her addresses was admirably done by her secretary. If she could not deny that her heart was still in the Rue Auber of Paris, she repressed her tears and took her new task—a very tangled one—resolutely in hand, doing some deep and lasting spiritual work in Amsterdam and other towns, where she sometimes had as many as forty or fifty penitents in one night.

She was lacking in what a statesman called "Batavian grace," being cast in a very different mould, yet she came ere long to feel quite at home among the warm-hearted Dutch people. She had taught Paris to sing her hymn, "Aimez toujours, et malgrez tout aimez toujours," and now she put the lesson into practice in Holland. Preaching and living the gospel of love, she had many tokens of success among all classes. Best of all, she awoke in others the wistful desire to imitate her example. One of Queen Wilhelmina's cabinet ministers brought his daughter, a thoughtful young girl, to a meeting conducted by the Maréchale, and when those who were willing to give themselves to Christ and His service were invited to show it in some way, up went the hand of this eager girl. Her father at once whisked her out of the meeting. But the deed was done, and now there is no one who is doing a nobler work among the poor and sunken classes of Holland than Miss Rose Pierson. Of that happy day in her life she wrote long afterwards: "When I first heard the Maréchale speak I was a girl of seventeen. I remember still every word she spoke. I know it was a revelation to me what a reality Christ could be to a soul. I believe that was what impressed me—her perfect assurance of Christ's presence and her own ardent love of souls."

Holland gave the Maréchale two of her most efficient secretaries, Miss Van der Werken and Miss de Zwaan, who ideally fulfilled all the requirements of the office—ability and willingness to nurse a babe, make a cup of tea, write a letter, cook a decent dinner, talk in two or three languages, keep the door of a hall, preach a sermon, and generally make the best of everything!

It is possible that the Maréchale's exile from France deepened and enriched her nature, drawing out stops not so often used before, especially the vox humana—the voice of sympathy with all human pain and sorrow. At the same time she began to have a more tragic sense of the world's sin, which prompted one of her strangest and yet most characteristic impulses, and issued in what was in some ways the most remarkable of all her campaigns.

One midnight, while she lay awake in Amsterdam, she heard a clear inner voice saying to her, "Go to Brussels; go in sackcloth and ashes; go and tell of sin; let everything in your person speak of sin and awaken conscience; then proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world."

Without waiting to take counsel with flesh and blood, she went with her nurse-secretary Swaan and her babe Frida, the child of peace, to Brussels, and hired for three weeks the most beautiful hall in the city, the Salle de la Grande Harmonic—the same in which fair women and brave men danced on the eve of Waterloo.

When she at length divulged to one of her comrades the fact that she was to appear in sackcloth and ashes, he answered—

"You cannot! never!"

"I must, it is so commanded."

So a robe de bure was made for her—a single-seamed garment of the coarse brown stuff worn by monks, with a hole cut out for the neck and two for the arms, and a hempen rope for the waist.

Before the opening meeting she had intimate dealings with her officers. "It is necessary," she said, "that one die for the people. I want to bring that thoughtless, frivolous city into touch with God. I wish your faces to speak of another world. It is your minds and hearts that I seek. If you are going to think of your own people and your own concerns, if you are going to be preoccupied with a hundred and one things, go back at once. I am going to live these three weeks as if they were the last on earth. I have left home and little ones and am going to exist for this town. If Christ laid down His life for us, we have got to lay down our lives for the salvation of Brussels." There were heart-searchings and confessions and tears among the officers; fresh alliances were made with God; and the Maréchale believed that this was one of the secrets of the wonderful success of that campaign.

On the evening of the first meeting, she clothed herself in the robe de bure, and put real ashes on her head. But if ever the devil in person attacked any poor soul, the Maréchale felt herself so assailed in those moments when the great hall was filling and she was waiting. What shafts of ridicule were hurled at her as by a spiritual foe! Could any dress he more ridiculous, any realism more contemptible? How comical was that assumption of the rôle of prophet! What a miserable fiasco the whole performance would prove! She was seized with a paralysing fear, and when Antomarchi—her "St. Francis"—came to announce that the audience was ready, he found her white as a sheet and shaking from head to foot.

"Have I made a mistake?" she asked.

"No! Maréchale, go on! go on! it is all right!"

"Tell them to sing and pray, and then I will come."

Her soul gathered strength from the strains of her own hymn, "O toi! bien-aimé fils de l'homme," with the chorus—

Viens, Jésus t'appelle;

Ne sois plus rebelle.

Viens au bien-aimé Fils de Dieu,

Crois en sa tendresse éternelle—

as well as from the succeeding silence in which she knew that faithful hearts were praying for her. The clouds vanished, the fear of men was gone, and only the awe of the unseen world remained upon her spirit.

Slowly she walked onto the platform, not raising her eyes from the ground. The audience seemed petrified by the strange apparition. After a moment of deathly silence, her clear, penetrating voice sounded through the hall.

"'He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ... and we esteemed Him not. Nous n'en avons fait aucun cas.'

"If I wear mourning to-night, it is the better to express the feelings which are in the depths of my heart. Your people, who are capable of great things, are going to their ruin. On all hands there are nameless miseries, despairing cries of women and children without defence and exposed to shame and the most frightful misery, and why? Because you have made Him—Christ—of no account. I mourn your sins, the sins of your country; the drunkenness, the debauchery, the selfishness, the wrongs which are seen everywhere; your rejection of the Christ of God, the Saviour of the world. This fills me with sorrow, and this, unless it is forsaken, will bring upon you the judgments of God."

Thus she unburdened her soul, and thus began not a three weeks' but a two months' campaign, which from the first moment—in so strange contrast to the tumultuous openings at Havre and Rouen—was marked by a beautiful reverence and solemnity. The services of the police were never required during the whole time. Four or five evening meetings were held every week, besides afternoon gatherings, salon meetings, and midnight suppers. All Brussels was moved. An eminent statesman said to the Maréchale, "Everybody has been ridiculed here except you. Ridicule kills everything; you have killed ridicule."

In the full tide of the mission she wrote to her father: "Most marvellously is God working here in Brussels. Last night I had the concert-hall crowded and a great number were turned back at the door. The silence, the attention is unbroken, and there is conviction among all kind of persons. Worldly and Catholic papers speak beautifully of us. Four journals have given leading articles to me. Praise God, it is all His work! This morning I had a conversation with a senator who is at the head of the party of progress here, and he says that the movement is the most remarkable "the city has seen for a hundred years and that the effects are profound and astonishing." Another senator has sent me £20. I feel more than ever now I ought to continue and push the battle. We shall be able to do something extraordinary and put Belgium on a new footing."

The first senator referred to in the letter was M. le Jeune, who said to the Maréchale—

"The bar, the artist world, society, Catholic and Protestant—they have all come to hear you. You are universal, Madame."

"Yes," she answered, "the Christ is universal."

During these two months she had daily interviews with men and women crushed under the burden of all kinds of sin—a burden that weighed so heavily on her own spirit that sometimes, instead of delivering an address, she could only fall on her knees and cry to God to forgive all the sins that come from the heart of man—murders, adulteries, thefts, uncleanness, lies, blasphemies—all of which had been confessed to her.

It was a time of wonderful spiritual blessing for all her comrades, who, like her, literally "lived for the people." One of them said, "We have grown as much with you in these weeks as in twenty years."

To a thousand men of the élite of Brussels she delivered an address—which was afterwards published—on "The Greatest Injustice of the Century." It was a woman's mournful, tender, passionate protest against man's sins in a city which had its twelve thousand so-called filles de joie, many of them of the tenderest years. One of her audience, a typical Brussels man of the world, covering his face with a hand on which flashed a diamond ring, and shaking with great sobs of anguish, cried, "I am a leper—damned already!" "Madame," said an editor, "they would hiss anybody else who said these things to them. They bear them from you, because they feel you love them."

One day she received an invitation to dine with a dozen anarchists. Her comrades told her of the danger of bombs, etc., but she went, and, many years after when asked by an English Divine, "How did you get into such society?" she answered, "Extremes meet."

"So you are come to talk to us," said Elisée Recluse[3] with a smile, "of justification by faith and sanctification by faith," etc.

[3] Exiled from France as an anarchist, he had become a Professor in Brussels. He had been trained as a Protestant Pastor. He was the greatest geographer of modern times, the writer of Une nouvelle géographie universelle (19 vols.).

"Oh, no, no! I do not talk of doctrines. They never troubled me in my life. I care only for realities. You have suffered; I too have suffered. Let us begin there, and compare notes. Some of you have been in prison; I have been in prison. You have been exiled; so have I. You have wept over the injustice and cruelties of the world; so have I wept, so do I weep."

And thus they found common ground, agreeing in their diagnosis of the diseases of society; differing only as to the remedy. "You believe in anarchy," said the Maréchale. "One of your number said at one of my meetings that anarchy is the most beautiful of all religions. I know a more excellent way—a shorter cut to making the world better. You fling your bombs to destroy life; how can people be converted when their heads are gone? Christ said 'Follow me to Calvary!' He shed His own blood. No one else's. He bids us save the world by denying ourselves and taking up the Cross."

That evening Elisée Recluse drove her in his carriage to her meeting at the Salle Harmonie, and in her little ante-room they prayed together.

A Brussels sculptor begged the Maréchale to pose for him in her robe de bure, but she declined. Renée Gange, the heroine of the Belgian socialists, after passionately embracing her before a thousand eyes, published a charming pen-and-ink portrait of "this enigmatic woman," comparing her to a serene, calm statue that almost smiles. "The fine and slender figure of the Maréchale will long remain one of the most curious, the most strange apparitions in the midst of our society of money-makers and machine-constructors."

The prophet, the mystic, the saint will always be a mystery to the art and science, not to speak of the sin and selfishness, of the world. This truth was finely expressed by a writer in L'Art moderne of Brussels. "The Maréchale does not seek to 'demonstrate' anything. I have seen her shrug her shoulders a little and smile when some one wished to reason or discuss with her. She could do it, for she is intelligent and merveilleusement intuitive. But her faith does not 'demonstrate' itself. It lives and expands itself. It affirms itself. And those who, now numerous, have some psychological tact have felt that this woman obeyed something more powerful than herself. Perhaps she is the happy and unconscious instrument of an expansive force too much ignored, too little recognised and obeyed, as necessary for our preservation as the law of self-preservation itself.... Her addresses are neither weighed nor balanced. But they have the colour, the life, the strong suggestiveness, the moving sincerity of an inspiration come from one knows not where, from above us, from outside us—mysterious impulses of things eternal."

CHAPTER XIV

TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE

In the year 1902 the Maréchale and her husband severed their connection with the Salvation Army. Concerning the causes that led to this, it is their united wish that nothing should be said that would interrupt the good feeling that has always existed, and still exists between them and thousands of their old and dearly loved comrades in that organization.

There are those who have misjudged the Maréchale in this matter, as having taken this step for personal advantage, and without due regard to its effect on her father and his work. How little do they know the truth. To one who has read the correspondence of those days, and all other days since, who has watched within the inner circle of the home, overhearing the most confidential conversations, nothing could be so shocking a contravention of the truth as to accuse this devoted daughter either of parental disregard, or self-willed unconcern for the welfare of the Kingdom of Christ. This step cost heart's blood to the Maréchale.

"Katie," said the General in Victoria Station, when she was starting on her second journey to France, "you have remarkable instincts; follow them, and you will never go wrong." Twenty years after, her friend Mlle. Constance Monod, the daughter of the great French preacher, wrote to her, "I would beseech you to trust yourself, trust your divine instinct, which God has developed so, so wonderfully in you."

Heredity, training and experience had combined to give her the instincts of a prophetic soul-winner. The grace of God had imparted to her a spirit of wisdom and revelation. Her intuitions were at once her strength and her safety. Her instinctive love of the true, the beautiful, and the good, her instinctive hatred of the false, the sordid, and the selfish, formed the touchstone to which she brought everything in the moral, social and religious life of France. Great numbers of the élite of Paris and other cities, who were technically far better educated than she, came and sat at her feet, because they bowed to the authority of the Christ-Spirit in her. And her instincts of sympathy with poor, sick, suffering souls drew multitudes who were outside the pale of the Church to the Saviour.

She always maintained that she went on her mission as a simple English girl, doing only what any other girl, with the same opportunities and the same faith, might have done. There is a divine power in a woman's instincts of purity and righteousness which puts the baseness of men to shame. That power, many believe, will be the chief factor in the salvation of the modern Church and modern society. Ours is an age which needs Deborahs and Huldahs with their divine instincts. The Song of Songs tells how a simple Hebrew girl, tempted by the glory of the world, but strong in her passion of holy love, merited the wonderful ascription, "Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners." If the Christian womanhood of the twentieth century rises to that level, the future of the Kingdom of God will be far more glorious than its past.

The Maréchale's instincts for the beautiful in nature and in art doubtless constituted no small part of her charm for the Latin races. She looked at all the glory of heaven and earth with a poet's eyes. During her early crowded life of evangelism in England, her father once took her on a tour through the Trossachs of Scotland, and the memory of that vision of beauty at the age of sixteen ever afterwards haunted her like a passion. "Let me stay here!" she said to the General, whose reply, calling a soldier to arms, equally remained in her memory: "Men are more interesting than scenery." If she scarcely ever took holidays in after life, it was not that she did not sometimes sigh for the wings of a dove that she might fly away and be at rest. There was a lifelong conflict between the natural and the ascetic in her.

She had never had time to cultivate any art except music, but her sense of everything lovely in form and colour and sound was exquisite, and she became without study a supreme artist in at least one department. At the time of the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, there was a grand Exhibition of all that women can do in the modern world. A deputation waited on the Maréchale and begged her to give an address along with two other well-known lady speakers. She agreed to come, provided she should be allowed to choose her own subject. Consent was readily given, and she delivered an address in French upon what Christ has done for Woman and what Woman for Christ. She gave no thought to the manner of delivery; she merely realised that she had a golden opportunity of proclaiming her Saviour to a magnificent audience. She had never in her life received a lesson in elocution, and to have done so might have seemed to her wicked backsliding. But she was awarded the palm of eloquence.

If her scholastic education was somewhat defective, she was wonderfully guided by her instincts in her later self-education. During her American tour she was taken one day by three white-haired professors to see the greatest library in the States. Her unsophisticated mind was bewildered by all that mass of learning. "Surely," she said, "it must strike despair into the minds of the students!"

One of her guides questioned her about her own favourite books.

"Well," she answered, "I have never been a reader; I think I have only two."

"What might they be?"

"One of them you know."

"Yes, the Bible; what is the second?"

"The Heart of Man. I am always at it, on land and sea, in the streets and in railway carriages, morning, noon and night. It helps me with my first book better than any commentary."

She came to know the Bible with a thoroughness which not one man in ten thousand ever attains. Her spiritual instinct seized, and her extraordinary memory retained, the vital and the essential. She never studied the Bible in the ordinary way, sitting down with lexicon and concordance. There was no time for that in her busy life. She took her spiritual food from the Bible as the bee sips honey from flowers. The Bible was her companion and she read it for pleasure. She absorbed and assimilated it without effort. That she knew much of it by heart was of less importance than the fact that it became part of herself. Therein lay her power of expounding and applying it. "Nothing," said Dr. Munroe Gibson after listening to her nightly for a week, "charmed our people more than her expositions of Scripture."

The truths by which she lived came to her intuitively. Her religion did not consist of commandments and dogmas. It was life, light, liberty, and above all love. Alike in what she accepted and what she rejected, she acted instinctively—she could do no other. She had an aversion to religious controversy. Arguments made little or no impression upon her mind. She might sometimes be overwhelmed with theological doctrines, the truth of which she could neither affirm nor deny, but in the end she would emerge with the naïve remark, "I am a very simple child, and I must have a child's religion." She always held that Christ's religion is for the multitude, and that the multitude are children. The essence of Christianity can be assimilated by boys and girls who do not know how to read and write, and they may become saints and saviours. A glance at the Maréchale's well-used Bible suffices to prove that for her the heart of the Old Testament is in Hosea, the prophet of love, and Isaiah the prophet of atonement, while the heart of the New Testament is in the story of the returning prodigal or the penitent Magdalene.

Genius is never easy to understand. Its weakness is often related to its strength. It has what the French call the defects of its qualities. A great part of the Maréchale's power certainly lay in her childlike humility. As a soul-winner she never gave the impression of condescending. She did not need to stoop; by nature and by grace she was meek and lowly in heart. What drew multitudes of poor sinners to her was their assurance that she would hear with human sympathy their tales of sin and sorrow. At one of her midnight suppers a French lady said to her, "I have been here all these years trying to bring these poor girls together. How is it that you succeed where I fail, in getting them to open their hearts to you?"

"Perhaps," said the Maréchale, "it is because I do not make them feel that there is a difference between them and me."

With her humility there was bound up a certain measure of self-distrust. In her, as in her father, whom she resembled so strongly in spirit as well as in features, there was an extraordinary combination of confidence and diffidence. It used to be said by those who knew the General most intimately that, while he commanded an Army, he was apologetic to his cook. And if the Maréchale had a splendid moral courage, as her manner of dealing with hostile crowds abundantly proved, she had also a womanly timidity in which there lay a certain subtle danger. So long as she had faith in her God-given instincts, and in the individual guidance of the Holy Spirit, she was unconquerable, but if anything undermined them her power was for the time being paralysed. For the criticisms of the world she cared little or nothing, but the real love and understanding of her comrades was as the breath of life to her. From them she was always eager to learn, and sometimes she let the judgment of others obscure her spiritual and womanly intuitions.

She would sit at the feet of this or that teacher who spoke with an air of wisdom and authority, when in nine cases out of ten the relation of teacher and taught ought to have been reversed. As a rule, her instincts made her a swift and unerring discerner of spirits, but there were exceptional cases in which it almost seemed disloyalty to "try the spirits whether they are of God." One of her life-long friends, Mr. W. T. Stead, who went down on the ill-fated Titanic, knew both sides of her character—her lion-like boldness as well as her dove-like gentleness. He used to relate how she one day invaded the office of the Pall Mall Gazette, and summoned him with all the categorical imperiousness of her nature and her mission to quit politics and edit the War Cry. Yet he used to say to her, with a seriousness that was not altogether assumed, "You are damned by your humility!"

It is well known that the Maréchale's husband was for a time a believer in Dr. Dowie, the Scotsman who founded Zion City beside Chicago. Finding that certain doctrines such as Faith Healing, the Second Advent, the Rapture of the Saints, which were to him, as to thousands of others, of vital importance,—were being faithfully preached by one who claimed to be the second Elijah, the Forerunner of Christ, Mr. Booth-Clibborn became a member of the Christian Catholic Church. Having been a Quaker minister before his twenty years of faithful service in the Salvation Army, he also cherished the hope of perfecting Zionism by adding to it his own peace principles.

The Maréchale could not accept Dr. Dowie's claims, but in her intense desire for family unity she consented to go with her husband to see Zion City, taking her two eldest daughters, Evangeline and Victoria, then fourteen and thirteen years of age, and baby Josephine, who was but four months old, with her. They remained there four months, July to October, 1902.

The diary and letters which she wrote during that visit are psychologically and Spiritually among the most interesting human documents I have ever seen, and sufficiently indicate her attitude of mind at this time. But let us draw a veil, except for one or two incidents and extracts, over the dark anguish of soul, the torture of uncertainty, and the depths of despair which she then passed through.

She implored Dr. Dowie to take her husband and ordain him without her, but he emphatically refused to do so.

The following paragraph, taken from her diary, shows in what a painful predicament she found herself. Speaking of a friendly adviser, she says: "He said, as I was the wife, the responsibility was on my husband, and I must stand by him, even if he was in error, and God would forgive me if it was a mistake." I felt so much taken aback by the way he looked at the matter that I turned the key of my heart.

To one of her dearest friends she wrote a long letter, which was a cry out of the depths: "I am not easily given to discouragement or despair, but my position must make angels weep, if they can weep. I cannot bring myself to accept Dowie, so much in him violates the highest spiritual instincts I have.... The forcing of me outwardly does not convince me. I have yielded all along the line, and now here I am ... but I am not in despair. I have been. It seems to me as if God, who has seen the long agony, will himself open the door. I cannot go further in this direction.... I feel a fear over everything. I never was so unutterably unhappy in my life, never. Oh, will you not help me?"

One day the prophet was attacking some noted evangelists of the day. Presently he began to fulminate against the Salvation Army, and accused the General of failing to reprove the sins of the rich. The Maréchale leapt to her feet, and facing the prophet with outstretched finger and flashing eye, an image of outraged justice, exclaimed, "That is an untruth! No man has been more faithful in reproving the rich than my father and it is cowardly of you to attack a man who is not here to defend himself." The prophet visibly quailed under the withering rebuke. It was the first time any one had withstood him to the face. With an hour of thundering oratory he tried to obliterate the impression made on the vast audience, but for once he was evidently checkmated.

At length Dr. Dowie, seeing he could not overcome the Maréchale's opposition, and that her unwilling presence in the city was a disturbing factor among his people, requested her and her husband to withdraw. Mr. Booth-Clibborn, of whose absolute sincerity there can be no doubt, was keenly disappointed at having to turn his back upon Zion, which had become to him, as the Salvation Army in its early days a cause to live for, and if need be to die for.

The strain on the Maréchale had been so great that when she arrived in England she was utterly prostrated. Two dear old cousins of her husband's, the Misses Susan and Esther Bell, in Eastbourne, nursed her back to life. Then came two dark, silent years in Brussels. The Maréchale looked for a friend and found none. All the world believed that she had "joined Zion." The French papers announced that she had burned (brulé) the principles for which she had once fought. Her daughter Victoria, who was with her in those years of lonely sorrow, writes: "Gradually her strength left her. She suffered dumbly, vainly hoping for some deliverance. Was this the Maréchale who had led her army to battle and faced the howling mob with a smile on her face? Her sorrow had crushed and sapped her courage which the storm of persecution only served to quicken."

Her children had starvation staring them in the face; another terrible illness, brought on by household care, laid her low; her spirit was exhausted by the torturing strain of years; and she could hold out no longer. In a "blind faith, without conviction," she was received into Zion Church. Broken on the wheel of life, stretched too long upon the rack of this tough world, she accepted—like Savonarola and Galileo, like Cranmer and Jeanne d'Arc—an alien creed, without her reason being convinced or her heart won.

But—again like those—not for long. Her deliverance came in a startling fashion. Soon after her removal with her family to Paris, her husband began to suffer from the effects of a neglected influenza which settled in his knee. True to his principles, he refused to see a doctor. When he was at the brink of death, the Maréchale brought in a physician in the guise of a friend. The sick man's case was at first pronounced to be hopeless, but three of the finest surgeons of Paris were hastily summoned, performed four operations, and saved his life, leaving him, however, crippled for the rest of his days.

The dismissal of Mr. Booth-Clibborn followed as a matter of course. He had violated the strictest laws of Zion by accepting the aid of surgery. Two of his own converts, now followers of Dr. Dowie, invaded the sick room, and handed him the fateful document. Some time afterward he wrote: "Dowie was a good man at one time. So was the devil. Dowie fell through the same sin—Pride." In addition to a statement which was published in four countries, he has recently borne the following conclusive testimony: "The Maréchale would never have had anything to do with Dr. Dowie but for me. When she came near him it was on every occasion unwillingly. She suffered unutterable anguish, pain and grief, from the fact that from the first all her instincts, as well as the consciousness of her true religious interest, were against Dr. Dowie's spiritual personality, his ways, his claims, his style of government. If, in a kind of despair, she went with me into it, though she was in it she was not of it. It was never sought, it was endured. The only comfort in the enduring was the possibility of doing a little good meanwhile to people in it, and of ultimately helping in the opening of my eyes."

CHAPTER XV

SURSUM CORDA!

All the Maréchale's hearers remember her penetrating gaze. No one ever encountered her eyes and saw them shift. Thousands have felt as if she were looking through all disguises into their very souls, and her tapering index finger has often made the bravest quail. "All through the night," wrote a convicted sinner, "I saw her finger pointing straight at me." And one feels certain that her look was never more direct, never more searching, than when it was turned inward. She has always had a passion for seeing things as they are, especially the things of the spirit.

We are not surprised, therefore, at her often repeated words: "This experience has taught me the folly of violating God-given instinct, and allowing the inner light of God's Holy Spirit to be darkened by man. When I compare myself with what I was in the past, in many respects it seems as if that person was dead!"

Drawn by the cords of love, held by ties too sacred to be broken, worn by years of poverty and sickness, and moving at last in a kind of trance, more dead than alive, one of God's truest and bravest servants blindly stumbled on till she found herself, for a time of agony, in a spiritual prison-house from which there seemed to be no escape.

Her greatest danger lay in a kind of fatalistic submission, which would have meant permanent disloyalty to her own ideals and convictions, as well as the abandonment of her vocation. She read the letters of Père Didon, whose heroic acceptance of his destiny influenced her in the direction of sinking her individuality. And one cannot understand the exquisite torture of her position unless one realises that her mind had often been made an arena of conflict between the apparently irreconcilable claims of the domestic and the apostolic life. And yet, Father Hyacinth once said to her in Paris, "You are the only woman I have ever met who has reconciled the vocation of a mother with that of an apostle." It may be appropriate to say here that the prayers of both father and mother have been answered in the conversion of their ten children, who have of their own free will consecrated themselves to the service of Christ. Four sons and three daughters are already engaged in active evangelistic work, and have been used of God for the conversion of many souls.

To bring the Maréchale back to liberty, God used the voices of nature, of children and of friends.

She had always had a poet's sensitive ear for earth's thousand voices of praise, and, sitting in a garden on a spring morning, she wrote: "The past, whoever was right or wrong, shall be buried. Let the dead bury their dead. Leave it, and this beautiful spring-tide let us begin again. The crocuses and snowdrops in this lovely garden all say, 'New Resurrection life!'"

Her own children's voices called her back into the thick of the old spiritual battle. "Now for the children," she wrote; "they must all see some salvation work, and they will feel the glow of the heavenly fire. It will warm them, and say something far more than all the Bible lessons in the world." Her eldest daughters, at that time girls of sixteen and fifteen, but with a wisdom far beyond their years, literally pushed her into the war, and if ever she was unable to go they buckled on their armour and took her place. "Mother writes me," says Victoria in her journal, "that Evangeline held a beautiful meeting on Sunday because she herself was too ill to go. Poor mother, it is difficult for her to keep up her courage." This diarist of fifteen thus philosophises on the meaning of her mother's sorrow. "Everybody can understand why God lets people of the world, the infidels, the self-seekers, the indifferent, suffer. It is to bring them to Himself through disappointments in the world, in themselves, and in others. But why He allows His children that love Him, those whose greatest wish is to serve Him—why He allows them to suffer is a mystery. Perhaps it is to bring them into still closer communion with Himself, so that they may become one with Him—His, body, soul and spirit, without reserve."

The Maréchale's friends helped to bring her back to her predestined work of soul-winning.

During a time of awful silence, in which she never received a call and rarely a letter, she had not courage to visit any of her old comrades in Paris. Once, in her great sorrow, she wanted to get away to some sympathising friend and open her heart. At first she could think of no one, but suddenly she remembered a humble working woman, and, taking the train to Paris, she wearily climbed to the fifth story of a house in the Villette, sat down in this woman's little room, and burst into a flood of tears. Her friend tried to comfort her and, not quite understanding this passionate grief, made her lie down in her own bed while she prepared for her a delicious little French meal.

Twenty years before, on a dark winter night, the Maréchale was passing along the Seine embankment on the way to her place of meeting on the Quai de Valmy. She noticed a girl gazing at the dark, cold waters, and a voice told her that she was meditating suicide. Touching her arm she said—

"Don't look at those black, cruel waters. Come with me and have a nice cup of coffee. You seem to be in trouble."

The girl, whose face was dark and sullen, looked at her suspiciously, and did not speak. The Maréchale gently pleaded with her to come and hear a lady sing.

"She sings beautifully, and you will find light and warmth and comfort, and you will have a good cup of coffee. Do come with me."

The girl at length consented and came. She heard the Maréchale herself sing. She sat right through the service without opening her lips and with a hard look on her face. At the end the Maréchale went down beside her, asked if she had enjoyed the meeting, and said a word to her about the goodness of God. At the mention of the name of God, the girl burst into passionate speech.

"God! Don't talk to me of God! I hate Him. What has He done for me? Why did He take my mother? He doesn't care for me. If He did He would not have let me be born in prison. What have I done to deserve such a life as this? It isn't my fault."

But, while the Maréchale talked with her and prayed with her, the girl's heart was softened. She began to attend the meetings, and soon gave her heart to the Lord Jesus. Born in a prison, and saved from suicide in the Seine, she became in turn her rescuer's best comforter in an hour of supreme sorrow.

When the Maréchale at length plucked up heart to revisit England, after a long absence and silence, her steps were directed to the home of a dear friend and kindred spirit in South London. It was in early girlhood that Mrs. Holman of Jerviston was first attracted to the Maréchale. Her mother had, as Lady Mayoress, invited Miss Booth, before the work began in France, to address a drawing-room meeting in her house, and the indelible impressions made on a receptive mind on that day proved an inspiration to a lifetime of quiet and devoted service of Christ. But so timid and dejected had the Maréchale become that she dreaded the reception that might await her even in the home of a lifelong friend! She trembled as she dragged herself across Streatham Common. She sat down on a seat and—her ruling passion strong as ever—spoke to a beggar about his soul, feeling a certain new kinship with all outcasts and pariahs. When she stood before her friend's door she scarcely had courage to ring the bell, and if she had been told to go to the kitchen and have a cup of tea with the servants, she would have answered quite simply, "Yes, I will go." But Mr. Holman himself opened the door, and his hearty welcome and the outflow of a perfect sympathy at once cast all her fears to the winds. Her friends were ministering angels to her. They nursed her back to health, dried her tears, and made her smile. Their little daughter—now one of the sweetest singers in London—carolled to her every morning and awoke "the hallelujah bird" again in her own breast. And God Himself was meanwhile doing for her what even the best of friends could not do—giving her the Resurrection Life, re-animating her hope, baptising her afresh with the Spirit, not of fear, but of power and of love, breaking all shackles and making her free—free from the ensnaring fear of man, free to obey the Divine call she had received even as a child—woman's Pentecostal call to prophesy for Christ, her one and only Master.

Aller An fang ist schwer, and the difficulties which the Maréchale encountered at the resumption of her work were enough to make any but the stoutest heart faint. If she had in the past shown a bravery transcending that of even the bravest all this was of small account compared to the heroism now required of her. In the past she had the help of her own people, her spiritual children, and a strong organization back of her. Now she was utterly alone, thousands all over the world had an erroneous conception of the entire situation, and many even believed she had made shipwreck of her faith. Her daughter Victoria stands out during that lonely period of beginnings. With remarkably clear judgment, discernment and sympathy she cheered and inspired her mother with her own enthusiastic hopefulness and vivid faith.

The greatest service anyone could render the Maréchale was to bid her go on, fulfil her destiny, believe that God would again mightily use and bless her. It might seem a small thing to say, "Be of good cheer," yet it was one of those "little nothings" for which she was ever afterwards profoundly grateful. I remember her coming one evening into my Chelsea study in a mood of depression, baffled by life's insoluble mysteries. Wondering what would lighten for her the burden and the weary weight, I took down Browning and began to read "Rabbi ben Ezra," which was new to her. From the opening words—

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was planned—

to the magnificent close, that inspired Sursum Corda thrilled her as a message direct from the great Heart of God. Only in one thing did she venture to differ from the poet. "He sees his heaven beyond," she said; "I want mine down here in the salvation of souls."

As soon as she resumed her work, she had her reward in signs following everywhere. Doors opened to her, first in England, then in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. She brought the breath of life into many churches, rekindled the zeal of many workers for Christ, and broke the chains which had bound multitudes of souls to an evil past.

Her own experience had given her, as a physician of souls, perhaps a deeper sympathy, a surer insight, a greater power to grapple with every form of evil than ever she had before. It became her mission to save people from themselves by convincing them that only one thing is entirely worth doing—living like Christ by letting Christ live in them. There are certainly few evangelists who have changed the whole current of so many lives in our country. Young ladies about to pass within convent walls have found a more excellent way by receiving the living Christ into their hearts. Actors and singers have consecrated their gifts to Christ and His kingdom. Young men of the world have heard the call of God and resolved to enter the ministry or go to the mission-field. God's gift of life has revealed to many questioning eyes its glorious possibilities. Multitudes who had no faith have heard another say that she has faith for them—a faith which has somehow dispelled the mists of doubt and error and brought them into the sunlight of Divine love.

At the same time her ever-deepening knowledge of her two books, the Bible and the Heart of Man, have made her a unique preacher to preachers. One night at Keswick, in the summer of 1907, a brilliant young Scottish minister, who was a member of a large house-party of clergymen attending the annual Convention, came home late for supper.

"Excuse me," he said, as he sat down, "but I could not tear myself away from the open-air meeting in the Square. I never heard such speaking in my life. I stood transfixed. The preacher was the daughter of General Booth, and I never knew the English language was such a magnificent weapon until to-night. Her preaching was extraordinary."

Next day, through Dr. Harry Guinness, who was her host, she was invited to address that house-party. Another preacher who was present has recorded his impressions. "After tea we all gathered our chairs in a circle round her as she opened up some sacred chapters in her life. Hour after hour sped. No one thought of moving to go to the Tent meetings. There we sat spellbound, through a long evening, feeling we had never come across such a being before. This was the first of many such meetings, to which as many outsiders were invited as the large drawing-room could hold. What evenings these were! Highland worthies sat gazing at her with open-mouthed wonder, held by her witchery, her strange tales from actual life, by her wisdom and pathos. Her voice, rich and sweet, sometimes fell to dreamy cadences, and sometimes rose to the bugling of a gale. It thrilled people and it melted them. Her eyes were wonderful. Sometimes they rested on one person in the audience with a soft and appealing look; then they gleamed and blazed with holy passion. Her long arms with their fine tapering fingers—how they helped to express her mind! But it was the face that was the great exponent, and as emotions played on her own mobile features she also touched the deep chords of every minister's heart. What struck us most was the access she won to the hearts of penitents. The mother-love in her was so deep and real that we all felt as if we, too, could give her our sacred confidences. A favourite word of hers was from St. Augustine, 'Love, and do as you like,' and every man in our company felt she was a living illustration of it. Her beautiful and choice language, simple, fresh, exquisitely fitting, and used with superb ease and mastery, was a constant amazement. She never attempted addresses or expositions, but her talks, for no other name would she apply, were now and again gemmed with texts which came as with a flash of diamonds, flaming."

Thus she revealed herself to men who know that the care of all cares is the "cure" of souls—cura curarum cura animarum. She warned them that the "apostolic life," the most Christ-like of all vocations, is only for those who are willing to "fill up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ." Prayer and fasting, love and sacrifice, real asceticism combined with joyful enthusiasm are the conditions of success in the never-ending warfare with evil. The world will always be a broad field of battle. But the living Christ gives so much of His real presence that His service is liberty and His rewards are sure. No breath of human praise can compare with the fervent and life-long gratitude which souls rescued from the powers of darkness bear to their deliverer. Since the Maréchale laid aside the French language—-perhaps only for a time—and resumed her mother-tongue, she has received literally thousands of English letters from both continents testifying to blessings received through her ministry. I here give a few carefully selected extracts from these letters with a few words of introduction.

One Sunday morning, as the Maréchale was about to address a large congregation, the minister whispered to her: "You see those two young ladies in black, if you can do anything with them, it would be a miracle."

In one of the after-meetings of the mission, the Maréchale approached the elder of these ladies and ventured to speak with her, but intense reserve on her part made conversation impossible. A cloud of utter despair seemed to have settled on her spirit. The look in her eyes revealed sorrow too deep for words.

This is her story:

"At twelve o'clock one night I was returning home from business with my mother and only sister. I found the body of my father hanging in the corridor! I was so horrified that for a moment I could not move, then, recovering my presence of mind, I put out the lights and called my mother and sister to another door, just in time to prevent them seeing the sight. But I can never forget it!

"Then my mother's health broke down, and for four years I faithfully watched and cared for her.

"During this second painful trial I received the startling news that my dearest and only brother had met with a serious accident while driving his own automobile. On arriving at the hospital in all haste I was met with the words, 'Too late.' He was gone! The scene which followed is too terrible for me to speak of. We adored him! The effects of the shock hastened my mother's death. We said good-bye to her, and oh, the recollection of it haunts me still.

"After my mother's death my sister and I left the house of tragedy, broken down with sorrow and grief. These blows were beyond my powers of endurance. In vain did I seek some ray of comfort. Then I grew careless! Wine began to get a hold on me; and I sank into depths of despair, of which you only know. I really thought there was no God, and contemplated ending my own existence.

"Through it all the Lord was looking down in tender compassion and love. He sent you at this critical time in my sad career.

"When I look back on the past I can only praise God for what He has done for me, through you.

"I am now conscious of the fact that He has washed and redeemed me through the precious blood. Jesus is very dear to me. He is the Lily of the Valley, the fairest of ten thousand to my soul. The pleasures of the world have henceforth no attraction for me, in Him I can overcome all temptations."

The following is from a gentleman in America, who, for thirty-five years, had never entered a church. He happened to hear the Maréchale once, and, rushing into the vestry, he broke down utterly and told her the tragical story of his life.

He was an illegitimate child, and his mother often used to beat him until the blood ran. As a lad he struggled hard to be good, and, although he was sometimes led astray through the drink, he always shunned anything of an immoral character.

He married a sweet German girl, and by honest labour obtained a very good position in New York, where he was esteemed by all who knew him.

At this juncture he met the French woman who ruined his life. He told the Maréchale between his sobs that his wife naturally refused to have him back. Remorse and anguish of mind had driven him twice to attempt suicide, but he was miraculously rescued. In January, 1914, he writes:

"Dear Maréchale and honored Spiritual Mother:

"It was with joy that I received your dear letter. God has indeed been wonderfully good to me, an undeserving sinner! He has rolled away the stone from a heart heavy with sin and sorrow. I thank Him daily for His mercy, and wonder how I could ever have lived so long without Him. No wonder I failed and would have been lost, had I not found Him at last through you, dear Maréchale. Life has a new meaning for me. It is a pleasure to live now, and before it was a curse. The musicians are playing ragtime while I am writing this, but God is playing another melody in my heart. I thank Him for the opportunity I have here to do good. God has indeed changed me. He has given me great power over the minds of my men. The change which, with His help, I have been able to effect in their natures in two short weeks is wonderful to see. I am happy, very happy.

"There is surely a devil, for he has sorely tempted me, but I shake him off like a feather, smiling happily in my God-given strength. I say to him, 'I fear you not, for I belong to Christ Jesus forever.'

"I am indeed in an unholy place. It is given over to the devil in every form, but what matters, I belong to Christ for all time.

"In prayer and humility I thank and greet thee, Beloved Maréchale."

A beautiful girl in society writes the following:

"All night long I have whispered your name over and over again to myself, saying, 'You have given me life, Maréchale, do you hear me? LIFE!!!!' I was dying of remorse and fear. I shudder when I think of what would have become of me if I had not come to you. I used to say to myself, 'Oh, well, what's the use, I have sinned beyond recall, so why not sin again, and again, and again? I am destined for Hell anyway, I may just as well get there as fast as I can'—that is what you have saved me from.

"I wonder how many times I have prayed 'Let me forget, only let me forget,' and the more I would pray, the more I would remember, and the more I would remember the more terrified I would get, until life seemed to slip away from me, and I would fall down, down, down, into a bottomless pit of horror.... And now I LIVE!!!! Oh, Maréchale (how I love that name, it sounds like music to me!) My mother gave life to my poor miserable body, but you gave life to my soul. My mother would not mind me loving you so if she knew that you gave me back to her."

Again she writes: "I have lived alone, absolutely alone. God only knows how utterly alone I have been! But now I have Him, a Some One who cares! Is it not wonderful, Maréchale, I am no longer alone for I have my Christ? The warm thing that flames in my soul is the knowledge that He loves me! Now I know why all these years I have searched with empty hands for something. I have it now, I LIVE!!!!"

A young gentleman whose life was transformed through attending the meetings held by the Maréchale's family in Keswick writes from Beyrout, Syria:

"Oh! what a responsibility it is for us to be the ambassadors of Christ, to represent Him to those who do not know Him, to be His Images! If it were not for us Christians, who so often stand in His way, Christ might have a chance. Some of the college men are meeting daily in my room to pray and I wish you could hear them praying in English, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and even Abyssinian. You would not understand the words, but you could never mistake the spirit.

"To-day I invited a man whom I know is in the hold of a terrible vice. He came, and during the half hour he looked as though he had made a mistake in coming, but, before he left, he had led in prayer for strength to overcome temptation.

"Don't you think America is a fine country? And yet, with all its great resources, opportunities and phenomenal progress, it is a very wicked country in many parts. Races, nations and individuals may prosper and succeed in plans for betterment and still be without the realisation of God,—they may be 'Good but Godless.'"

THE MARÉCHALE
(From a photograph taken at the Gainsborough Studio,
Oxford Street, London, W., in 1913)

With the tribute of one grateful heart this sketch may fitly close.

"I have been used in the past in the conversion of hundreds of souls, but I made a compromise and it has spelt ruin to my soul. No one knows how vile I have been, meriting desertion by God and man.... I had resolved to end my existence, but somehow I was brought to that meeting to hear about that Russian lady. Even then I determined you should not influence me, but God somehow through you gripped my life. I saw myself in the true light as (I say the words not in their usual sense) a 'blasted hypocrite.' Don't forget to echo and re-echo the words that reached me, 'Compromise with the world spells ruin.' That burnt into my soul.... I remember while you spoke a big lump rising in my throat, and just as you were closing your address the thought came, 'I wonder if she would understand.' Ay, more, I remember how you received me that day. God bless you. I came out of hell. I have a clear sky. I want to let you know that the consciousness of forgiveness of the past has come with almost an overwhelming force, and an awful load has gone. No daughter ever loved mother more than I love you, I know that. Why is it? Because God made you the means of my salvation. My heart just bursts with love and gratitude. So I am yours, and at that last great day you will see it if I come through at last.... Dear one, have you ever thought of this—some one by a gallant effort rescues lives from fire or shipwreck; the world applauds and honours the deliverer. You (by the grace of God) rescued me from shipwreck of soul. Christ will own it before His Father and all the countless multitudes."

THE END

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARÉCHALE ***